During his first two seasons in Oxford, Ole Miss head coach Houston Nutt did win.
It started with a 31-30 signature win over No. 4 Florida in the Swamp, included back-to-back wins over LSU and finished with the second of back-to-back Cotton Bowl wins. However, after a disappointing 4-8 season, followed by a 2-7 start to this season, Athletics Pete Boone announced that the 2011 football season will be the last for head coach Houston Nutt.
“Our goal is to compete for championships, and we are not making process in that regard,” Boone said in a statement. “It’s time for our team to have new leadership and a new direction.”
Nutt will finish out the season as head coach, but when the clocks hits 0:00 at Davis-Wade Stadium in Starkville on Nov. 26, the Houston Nutt era will be over.
“The bottom line is you have to win,” Nutt said. “There wasn’t a good feeling, I understand. I would like to have been here and seen it through because I wanted to go to Atlanta with this group. I understand the decisions that have to be made and that’s not up to me.”
In 2008, the Rebels returned to the national scene and finished with a top-15 ranking after a 47-34 win over Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl. The next offseason, Ole Miss appeared on regional covers of Sports Illustrated and started the season ranked in the top 10 of the Associated Press and USA Today Coaches’ polls.
The Rebels rose as high as number four in the AP poll before it all came crashing down in a 16-10 Thursday night loss at South Carolina. Ole Miss also lost to eventual national champion Alabama and on the Plains of Auburn, but also won against Arkansas, Tennessee and a top-10 LSU team.
Then, at that same Davis-Wade Stadium, it was the beginning of the end for Nutt’s future in Oxford. With second place in the SEC West and, perhaps, the Capital One Bowl on the line, Ole Miss took a 13-10 halftime lead, before Mississippi State dominated the second half to win 41-27. The Rebels bounced back to win their second straight Cotton Bowl, a 21-7 win over No. 19 Oklahoma State. When the calendar turned to 2010, Jevan Snead left early for the NFL Draft and the quarterback position became a revolving door for the past two seasons.
“The ones who won had the quarterbacks,” Nutt said of his teams. “I really feel like in my heart that if Jevan Sneed had come back his senior year, we would have had a tremendous start. As you go forward and you look at the recruits and dissect everything, there were some young men that we counted on from the state of Mississippi that did not pan out that we had to let go.”
With the loss at quarterback, Nutt successfully pursued Jeremiah Masoli, who transferred in from Oregon, to replace Snead. Masoli made plays and kept Ole Miss competitive in games, but the losses piled up, most embarrassingly at home to Jacksonville State, Vanderbilt and then a blowout loss at Tennessee, and Ole Miss finished a disappointing 4-8, including a 1-7 record in SEC play. This downward trend continued into this season with three different starting quarterbacks and the team extended its SEC losing streak to 12 games, the longest in school history.
Nutt has recruited three top-20 classes, but the attrition from players who are gone or never made it to campus has led to a lack of depth each of the past two seasons. Among the players expected to be counted on that never panned out are Tig Barksdale, Jesse Grandy, Jamar Hornsby, Patrick Patterson, Clarence Jackson, Delvin Jones and the list goes on and on.
“Those things add up,” Nutt said of attrition. “It doesn’t take but one bad recruiting year or a couple of misses or injuries for it to add up in this league. You have to be so consistent. As you fast forward and if you look at the last two recruiting classes and look at who is playing you realize how young we are.”
At the same time, you look at this team, the youngest in the SEC on both sides of the ball, and there is reason for optimism going forward. From Nutt’s most recent recruiting class and you see the team’s two leading receivers, a starting offensive lineman, a starting defensive lineman, three of the team’s top four corners and the team’s two leading tacklers from this past Saturday.
Like Nutt and his staff preach to the players, it’s about finishing and that’s why he did not walk away and why he will return to coach the final three games this season, “as bad as everybody may make everything seem.”
With the close of the Houston Nutt era, it’s now about the players and looking ahead to the future.
“I thank the university for this opportunity to be a part of the successes we have achieved over the past four seasons,” Nutt said. “There is always going to be a special place in my heart for Ole Miss. There is no doubt about it. It always comes back to me with the players. It is the players. I am excited about what we have right here. You are not far off.”