College football is never one to be outdone by its little brother college basketball, which is why it only makes sense that in a week when Larry Brown was hired as SMU’s hoops coach, a college football coaching rumor came out late Tuesday that seemed to be just as out of left field as Brown-to-SMU.
That rumor? Well Arkansas fans, I hope you’re sitting down. Because reports indicate that your school…has contacted Phil Fulmer to coach their football team.
Yikes.
Only it does appear as though the two sides have at least talked, with Fulmer’s former defensive coordinator Doug Matthews telling Nashville radio show 3HL:
“I know Phillip has had conversations with them,” Matthews told the radio show. “And when I say with them, all that is going to take place behind the scenes.
“But everything I’m hearing from Arkansas is the spring game, I think, is this Saturday. ‘Let’s get through spring. Let’s see where we are.’ But I think they’ll either go with a guy that they’ve got on the staff or they’ll bring in someone to be — caretaker’s the wrong word — but bring someone in who has been through it all before.”
Oh my.
Ok, so on the surface, this doesn’t appear to be a totally bad move. After all, Fulmer did coach in the SEC for 17 years, and did so impressively with a 152-52 record. Had you told most Arkansas fans the day Bobby Petrino was fired that he’d be replaced with a coach who was 100 games above .500 in the SEC, my guess is that just about every one of them would’ve said, “Where do I sign up?”
Of course, had you told them Fulmer’s name as a follow-up, most of them probably would’ve hopped on their motorcycles, and driven it straight into the nearest ditch.
For one, Fulmer is closing in on his 62nd birthday, meaning that if anything, he’d be a short-term stop-gap, in a lot of the same ways that Larry Brown is at SMU, actually. For a program looking for stability, bringing in a guy who is 62 doesn’t seem like the answer.
More importantly though, is how things ended at Tennessee. In two of Fulmer’s last four years, his team finished with a losing record, including in 2008 when he closed things out at 5-7.
Also, there was an overall perception in Fulmer’s final few years that the rest of the conference had caught up with him. For all the success he had in the SEC early on, that SEC simply isn’t the SEC that we know it today, the home of six straight National Champions. Rosters are more talented top-to-bottom, coaches are paid more, assistants are paid more, and virtually everyone has the same support in terms of facilities and resources. With TV money falling from the skies, the advantages that Fulmer inherited in the early 90’s simply weren’t there by the time he left.
Not to mention that as his time wrapped up in Knoxville, there was real discussion that the modern game had passed Fulmer by. For all the yapping that Lane Kiffin did when he arrived on the scene following Fulmer, Kiffin claimed that most of it was to “get a buzz back around Tennessee football.” Well, if the buzz was gone, wasn’t it Fulmer’s fault? It probably didn’t help that in his final four years at the school Tennessee was just 2-2 against Georgia and 0-4 against Urban Meyer and Florida. And the crazy part is that Fulmer left before Nick Saban had really built his super-power in Tuscaloosa, Les Miles built his Baton Rouge and Steve Spurrier got things going at South Carolina. Remember when I said this is a “different SEC” than the one Fulmer competed in for all those years in the 1990’s and early 2000’s? Yeah, well that’s what I’m talking.
Then there is the Arkansas job itself, and where a little bit of credit needs to be given to Petrino. When he snuck out the back door in Atlanta to come to Fayetteville, the program was in bad shape, left in tatters by the Houston Nutt regime (Hmm, where have we heard that before?). But in the wake of his firing, Petrino left a good foundation for the next guy, in depth and relative talent. Add in an always ravenous fan-base, and this job is one of the more underrated ones nationally.
Which means that the last thing that Jeff Long needs to do is rush into hiring the next head coach. Given what we’ve read, there seems to be no indication that he’d actually do that, and as Matthews said, the process won’t even begin, until spring practice ends this Saturday. Talk to most insiders, and the bet still seems to be that Arkansas will ride out the 2012 season internally, before putting together a national search in the winter.
So whether the Phil Fulmer-to-Arkansas rumor is true or not, really only Long and Fulmer know.
For the sake of Arkansas fans, let’s hope it’s not true though.
For all his opinion, insight and articles, be sure to follow Aaron on Twitter @Aaron_Torres.
