Questions About Past Football Coaches

[MSU124]

Bored at work and was looking at wikipedia about our past coaches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emory_Bellard
"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; ">After starting the1978 season4-0, Bellard resigned midseason after two consecutive losses (0-33 to Houston, 6-24 toBaylor)."
-What was the real reason he got fired him Texas A&M?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allyn_McKeen
-What happened to Allyn Mckeen? He seemed to be doing pretty good.

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[CivilEngineerDog]

and just quit. Also, he was a terrible judge of talent and a worse recruiter. Bob Tyler left him Sabinesque talent and he managed to totally screw it up.

 

[brantleyjones]

Bellard:

Story at the time was that after the 2 losses, some big Association of Former Students types talked badly to him and he told them to take the job and shove it. Could have been a Terry Bowden thing, but that wasn't the conventional wisdom.

McKeen:

Finished 4-4-1 his last season (1948), and lost to Ole Miss twice in a row, an apparently unpardonable sin back in those days. He also still ran the single wing offense, which message board fans considered to be old fashioned and boring. (I once read a reproduction of the Reflector editorial calling for his firing.) So, State fired him and hired Slick Morton, who came in and ran the more modern, more exciting split-T offense, and promptly went 0-8-1. The rest is, as they say, history. Naturally, General Bob Neyland and TN won the NC in 1951, running the dull, boring, and, obviously, obsolete single wing. That same year, Morton's team gave up 7 TD's to Ole Miss running back Showboat Boykin, but that's another story.

The moral of this story is that mediocrity is better than at least one of the alternatives, and as far as MSU athletics go, it's usually a huge improvement. (And, perhaps, that McKeen was the victim of his own success.)