Morris staying course after stumbling start, which is good thing

Chad Morris finds himself in the same position many big-name coaches have, basically finishing a demolition started by somebody else so he can start rebuilding.

That rebuilding started this week, by the way.

At a season review press conference Monday he compared it to growing bamboo where it takes awhile to see what’s going on before you have growth.

To me it’s more like taking over a development project others kept trying to patch for 10 years and realizing you’ve got to tear it down and build from scratch.

Morris has been here before. SMU started 2-10 in 2015 after the previous coach had effectively ran the program into the ground before leaving.

“When you go through years like this, you understand the outside doesn’t see the growth going on within the program,” he said, noting his SMU experience is helping now.

Other coaches have taken the rebuild path. Lou Holtz went 0-11 at South Carolina his first year there. Bear Bryant was 1-9 his first year at Texas A&M (and ran off over 100 players in the process, which you could do in 1954).

Tom Landry was 0-11-1 his first year in Dallas, then 3-10-1, advancing to 5-8-1 in 1962 when most of the town wanted him fired. Owner Clint Murchison responded with a stunning 10-year guaranteed contract.

The start I’ve seen parallels with is the 1989 Dallas Cowboys. Jerry Jones had bought the team and Jimmy Johnson coached it to 1-15. It was hard to find anybody in Dallas then that wanted them to still be around in 1990.

In the fourth year the Cowboys won the first of three Super Bowls in a four-year period.

What happened at Arkansas is not out of the realm of normal in these situations, but the lunatic fringe of the fan base isn’t hearing any of that. Add a few internet sociopaths, fans of other teams, trolling the Hog fans to stir things up and, well, there’s a lot of noise.

Morris and his staff is ignoring it. They are too politically correct to say it, but they don’t care what your opinion is of how they’re doing it.

“We didn’t finish, we didn’t finish,” Morris lamented Monday. “I think the loss against Ole Miss took the wind out of our sales.”

That one, coming on the heels of collapses against Colorado State and North Texas, made it yet another game the Hogs should have won … but didn’t. It’s also something he really isn’t comfortable with, either.

“I don’t want to admit that,” he said. “I think it took some wind out.”

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But, still, the team didn’t quit at that point. They beat Tulsa and put up 31 points in a loss to Vanderbilt.

“Our guys continued to fight,” he said.

Ask LSU. The Tigers had players falling down to keep from scoring and giving the ball back to the Hogs in the final five minutes of the game where they clung to a 24-17 lead.

“You come out here and you’ve got the No. 7-ranked team in the country on the ropes with five and a half minutes to play,” Morris said.

After that the Hogs went through the motions. Morris threw a fit after a loss to Mississippi State, then just wanted to get out of the finale against Missouri without losing any key people.

There will be new faces on the roster, but probably not on the coaching staff. The staff hit the road recruiting after the Missouri game and Thursday night were expected to be in front of former Clemson quarterback Kelly Bryant for the final pitch to the highly-touted graduate transfer.

And some old faces leaving for a wide variety of reasons.

“We expect somewhere getting upwards of 29 new faces in here,” Morris said. “We’ve had some that have chosen to move on, and we want to wish them the best. If we can help them in any way, we’ll be more than happy to.”

Stability with the coaching staff was assured earlier this week when defensive coordinator John Chavis exercised his option for two more years and that was a key move for Morris.

“We’ve got to continue to have more improvement,” Morris said. “Continuity is so much a part of success. They understand defensively what we’re doing and what we’re trying to do.

“We didn’t get to everything we wanted to do this year defensively, and that’s understandable. We didn’t progress at the rate we wanted to.”

It wasn’t at the rate anybody else wanted, either, but it’s the way these things work.

And could be the foundation for bigger things.