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Is Morris getting to most interesting part of plan we don’t know about?
Did Chad Morris have a plan he sold athletics director Hunter Yurachek on to that let him sit 10 talented players for first eight games of this season?
Through the first two-thirds of a season that is shaping up to be another historic failure, it’s looked as though Chad Morris has been afraid of having success.
Or else he thinks he knows how to do things better than a lot of other folks.
The questions all start at the quarterback position on offense, which has been a revolving door for two seasons now. Five different people have started and three of them aren’t on the team anymore.
The logic back in August at least made sense. Morris and offensive coordinator Joe Craddock apparently invoked some sort of logic that experience would be better than the quarterback they both said — repeatedly — got the team into the end zone in fall camp scrimmages.
Which is why that quarterback didn’t see the field in a game until October 26.
You wonder if they kept expecting the mistakes to go away with more experience from Ben Hicks and Nick Starkel. The only thing that appeared to improve was hitting defensive backs with more precision.
John Stephen Jones might not have all the measurables or even look like an SEC quarterback out there, but it became clear Saturday night against the No. 1 team in the country he knows how to play football better than either one of them.
“The moment was not too big for him,” Morris said in yet another post-mortem after getting throttled again by the Crimson Tide. “He did some really good things and just his spark, his confidence on the sidelines and when he would step into the huddle with those guys, I was proud of how he responded tonight.”
It became pretty clear, though, there were some packages that limited what they were going to try with Jones.
“We started putting in a few packages this week, I practiced those a little bit, and I was ready to go in,” Jones said later.
Jones at least does have a clue how to run an option. Hicks has shown he’s really only capable of running when the pocket collapses and he takes off on a scramble up the middle. Starkel looks like a lost stork when he tries it.
The biggest problems have looked all year like they are slow to make bad decisions.
“We’ve got to go back and study why we’re making some bad decisions with the football,” Morris said Saturday night.
Too often it looks like Morris is afraid to try something to win the game. Now, to be fair, I don’t think Morris is trying to tank games.
But either he knows something the rest of us don’t and hasn’t got a clue what to do.
What Morris might know the rest of us don’t is that the numbers in the win-loss column don’t matter … this year. Nobody can afford three straight years of abject failure.
Did Morris tell athletics director Hunter Yurachek shortly after being hired he was going to have to basically burn the thing to the ground and rebuild literally from the ground up?
More importantly, did Yurachek agree to that?
Surely both of them knew the public relations fallout that would result from that.
Oh, I hear constantly that this booster or that one is going to stop writing checks if Morris doesn’t win their own specific number of games, including one in the SEC.
No, they won’t. Their egos won’t let them quit writing those checks.
It might be a case where writing those checks gives them a chance to bend Yurachek’s ear occasionally and vent their frustrations. That’s been the case for 60 or 70 years.
But it usually doesn’t give them a vote unless they are in a position where they get to do that. All of that’s done in Little Rock by people who really have a lot of other factors to consider.
Could that be the reason we get the same explanations after the same results without a lot of changes?
These last four games could give some insight.
After a signing class that produced some pretty good results, 10 of them have stayed on the bench. Another seven still have that redshirt available after seeing limited time in a game or two.
That might just be the biggest indicator that Morris pitched a plan to Yurachek that he got the go-ahead to implement.
But we won’t know until after Thanksgiving.
