Nutt wins big in Hog opera
John Brummett

Is there a winner in sight in the latest tragi-comedic story line of our ever-running hogaholic soap opera, this business about football coaching, up on what the local television people incessantly call "the hill?"

Yeah, here's one: It's - oh, how I grimace to say this - Houston Dale Nutt.

He left on the high of a nationally acclaimed win on the road against a team that will play for the national championship. He got lathered with more than $3 million to resign.

In a matter of minutes, he landed a better-paying job as the coach of Ole Miss, which, for the first time in a long time, may enter next season with better personnel than Arkansas.

There are at least two other winners. They are head coaches elsewhere who used our clumsy, desperate, humiliating, all-toopublic overtures to leverage better deals for themselves where they were.

Those would be Auburn's Tommy Tuberville, who runs the ball every bit as much as Houston, and Clemson's Tommy Bowden, who loses every bit as many games as Houston.

This is all very sad to me, but only because I'm a native Arkansawyer old enough to remember when the Razorbacks were an elite football team. Now we throw millions around to be spurned by the No. 2 schools of two horrid states, Alabama and South Carolina.

Some say we ought just to settle, either for that Gus Malzahn dude two years out of high school coaching, or that Kojak/ Mr. Clean-looking chap, Reggie "Red" Herring, who is the current defensive coordinator and interim coach for the bowl game.

But I got a look via television Saturday at the Tulsa team, for whom this touted genius, Malzahn, is offensive coordinator. Maybe it was just a bad day.

It looked to me like playground ball: Here, you hike it to me, and the five of y'all run way down yonder, and I'll rear back and fling it.

At one point Tulsa got a first down near the goal-line, and didn't know what to do. They couldn't run. The end zone didn't provide a big enough playground for the usual antics. So they turned it over on downs.

They had players on the sideline holding signs with numbers on them. Those apparently were codes for incompleted passes.

This stuff worked against the Prescott Curley Wolves.

Herring is known for being a madman and blowhard. But he's seems to have tried to sedate himself for these interim coaching duties.

He's speaking in full and restrained sentences, with modulated volume, and respectfully of opponents.

Maybe we ought to just give him the job. He bears the advantage of seeming actually to want it. And he could keep it until he pulled a Woody Hays on the sideline.

John White is certainly no winner. The chancellor gave away the bank to extract Nutt's negotiated resignation, then double-talked his way through that charade of an announcement.

The new athletic director hasn't been here long enough for me to unload altogether. But he's not exactly distinguishing himself in this coaching search.

Whichever television station actually interrupted program- ming to announce Tuberville's imminent hiring, apparently because the ever-slick Tommy T. was discovered on a regular and long-planned hunting trip to eastern Arkansas - it's a loser, too.

To close on a positive note: There are a couple of winners in local sports journalism. Stephens Media's guy, Harry King, and the sports staff at the Morning News of Northwest Arkansas have been consistently fast, factual, fair and responsible throughout this coach-search odyssey.

Wally Hall of the other guys had a good column taking White to task and a better one about the outrage of Arkansas assistant coaches recruiting simultaneously for Ole Miss.

But, alas, I'm a loser. I badgered poor old Houston, never knowing what I had until he was gone.

Now he's going to bring Ole Miss into Fayetteville next year and beat us, and use some of his new wealth to rent an airplane that will fly over with a banner telling us to smooch him in a sunless location..

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His telephone number is 374-0699.