It was an interview recently in The Athletic when Drew Morgan may have provided a completely inadvertent insight into the spectacular failure of Chad Morris’ attempt at coaching in the SEC.
Morgan, who played for Bret Bielema after starting as a walk-on out of Greenwood, was not going anywhere and wanted to get into coaching and would have liked to start at Arkansas.
Morris, whose actions seldom matched what came out of his mouth, didn’t bother to return any of Morgan’s attempts at contact.
“Chad never got back with me,” Morgan told Kelli Stacy with The Athletic. “I was kind of like, ‘What the hell is going on? He could use me right now?’ … That never happened, and he’s off at Auburn right now, and I missed my window with him.”
There you have another piece of the puzzle. The coach who preached his respect for the former Razorbacks and being part of a family couldn’t pay a former player the courtesy of a simple phone call.
All of that’s before you get into this former player had a younger brother, Grant, who was one of your current players.
If you’re Morris that is a gigantic blunder and a lot of people in Morgan’s position would have spoken up about it then. If he did I didn’t hear about it.
Now, though, he’s gotten into the coaching game as offensive coordinator at Warner, Oklahoma, after spending a year with Rick Jones at Greenwood, then at Fayetteville High School last season.
But you get the idea he’d like to be back in the college game.
“I’d love to be in college (coaching),” Morgan told Tye Richardson and Tommy Craft (The Morning Rush) on ESPN Arkansas last week. “I’d love to be recruiting. It’s something about the younger coaches being able to connect with the younger-minded athletes … that’s one thing I’m real big on.”
Developing players is something he really enjoys.
“When it comes to developing quarterbacks and receivers is when you’re in the huddle and you’re a sophomore and you’re looking up to a senior, I can promise you right now that senior probably doesn’t trust you,” Morgan said. “I can promise you he’s not going to throw you the ball.”
What came next was a little insight into how the sophomore wide receiver deals with that.
“You’ve got to be on the same eye level as that senior quarterback,” he said. “There’s no, ‘oh I’m in the huddle with Brandon Allen’ and Brandon Allen’s not looking at me and saying, ‘oh, I’m in the huddle with Drew Morgan.’
“No, it’s ‘hey man, we’re in this huddle together and we’re going to go score together.’ It doesn’t matter how old you are, how young you are, what you can do and you can’t do, it’s if you want to.”
That’s a lot of advice for young receivers right there.
“It’s the intangibles,” Morgan said.
And that, maybe as much as anything, is what Morris didn’t have.
