Don’t compare Chad with recent Hogs’ coaches

In a summer filled with sports talk shows talking about Arkansas football from just about every vantage point, the fallback seems to be comparing new coach Chad Morris with previous coaches.

Yeah, the same talking heads that said Bret Bielema was a great hire when it was clear from the get-go that it wasn’t are trying to compare Morris to every coach the Razorbacks have had over the last 10 years.

Don’t start the Bielema justification talk again. He was a bad fit and when he was hired a former athletic director told me he didn’t think it was going to work because he had never coached outside his “mentor circle.”

At the time I had to ask what that was. As it was explained to me, Bielema had never worked for a single solitary soul who wasn’t part of the Hayden Fry coaching tree.

His only bosses had been Fry, Bill Snyder at Kansas State (who served under Fry for 13 seasons at North Texas and Iowa) and Barry Alvarez (eight years under Fry at Iowa).

That system was the only one he knew and, while it may work slightly better than average in the Big 10, it produced zero national championships and was a complete reversal from what worked in the Southeastern Conference.

You can’t compare Morris to Bielema. While Morris certainly has some mentors, he’s worked under various coaches, including helping lay the foundation at Clemson, which HAS won a national championship.

You can’t compare Morris to Bobby Petrino. Public relations was not something Petrino ever acted like he cared about or was remotely interested in. While he won some games he only did about as well as Houston Nutt in the SEC. More importantly he didn’t appear to have as much interest in recruiting as he did riding motorcycles.

Morris might compare in some ways to Nutt, but that was in the beginning stages of change in college football where recruiting became a game within the game and offenses were changing with the benefit of new rules.

No, Morris really doesn’t compare with those guys, but it has nothing to do with his offensive reputation.

Jimmy Johnson told me one time a football coach at any level is more of a psychologist than anything else. He said it came into play in recruiting as well as managing assistants, bosses, boosters and the players.

You get the impression Morris knows people. He’s the ultimate glass half-full type of guy. Ken Hatfield was like that.

The big knock on Morris was he didn’t exactly have highly-ranked recruiting classes at SMU and he didn’t win a ton of games in his three years there.

That’s simply not fair. Recruiting at SMU after 1985 was like trying to be a boxer with one arm strapped behind your back. It’s not an easy school to get into. Unlike some other places (Stanford and Vanderbilt) they don’t give much leeway for athletes.

Plus, he inherited a mess. For a program placed in NCAA purgatory for two years in 1987-88) — in a blatant case of selective enforcement — football wasn’t a priority to the powers that be in the school.

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The Mustangs hadn’t won more than six games in a season since the death penalty until 2009 and still haven’t won more than eight. It was always a tough place to get elite football players to unless you were willing to live in the gray area of the rules.

Yes, they crossed that line to the dark side on occasion, but no more than many other big time schools recruiting players in Texas during that wild period.

This is Morris’ first time as a head coach in the world of big time college football.

Why does he have a shot at succeeding where so many have fallen either just short or got stuck in the mud?

He has attacked recruiting like no one has in the modern era. That was always Frank Broyles’ strongest area of expertise. He could get good players … maybe not the best, but he got really good players.

He also got the best assistant coaches and let them do their thing. Fry, Barry Switzer, Johnson, Johnny Majors, Joe Gibbs, Raymond Berry … the list is really impressive.

Morris got John Chavis to Arkansas and he’s almost like a completely new man, totally buying into Morris. Chavis has been the top defensive coordinator in the country at various times over his long career and it’s a good bet he hasn’t forgotten how to do it.

But, like with Broyles, it is always recruiting. The Hogs will be hosting a barbecue for recruits this week and it appears the number coming in may be huge.

By all reports, Morris and the Razorback staff scored huge points at the Texas High School Coaching Association annual get-together in the past week.

It’s recruiting, recruiting, recruiting.

Like other championship-caliber coaches, Morris is ALWAYS recruiting. He knows the size of the platform he has at Arkansas being in the SEC. He uses it at every opportunity to send a message to potential players.

Nick Saban has that, too. So does Dabo Swinney at Clemson. Bobby Bowden at Florida State told his staff every year “signing those four and five-stars doesn’t mean you’ll win a national championship, but I can guarantee you we won’t if we don’t sign ’em.”

Morris isn’t at that level … yet. Saban didn’t have a No. 1 class until his sixth year in Tuscaloosa, but he was in the top five by his second year.

In the 247Sports.com composite recruiting rankings, the Hogs have finished in the Top 20 once (Petrino’s 2009 class).

Right now getting to No. 16 would be the Hogs’ best recruiting class ever since they started keeping score (and creating a season within the sport).

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And they would still be seventh in the SEC West rankings.

That’s the hill Morris is climbing. He is attacking it from the left lane, with the hammer down and wide open.

Which is something no other coach has done.