Yeah the Leach/Arnett/Dudek/Emerick deadweights finally reared their inevitable results the air raid cult refused to see coming
Selmon said the quiet part out loud ….
- Thread starter Shmuley
- Start date
Arnett was to blame for our offensive demolition. He gutted our offensive coaching staff and a lot of the players said goodbye. Good for them. If you are still blaming Leach for our offensive woes go do some research.
Personally, I thought Arnett was a good choice to keep recruits that had given us verbal commitments. Then he gutted the offensive coaching staff and my opinion changed.
It doesn't have to be a total and complete reset if the AD is around for multiple hires.
You might have the same exact system but you can have some continuity. Take Mullen's system. There are plenty of athletes in Mississippi to make Mullen's system or relatively close variations successful.
Spread offense with power run mixed in as your identity
Mobile qb to gain a blocking advantage at times
Play action pass
Little bit of read option
Chris Relf took us to 9-4. You can find a lot of guys like Chris Relf who you can make into decent QBs.
You don't need stud wide receivers. Bear wasn't a stud. Good but not great.
Need a decent O-line that is will coached. Dillon Day wasn't a stud. Good but not great.
Just recruit well enough to improve the player and the situation and hopefully you have the right pieces fall together for the occasional 2014 scenario. Maybe get lucky and have a 2014 year with an Ole Miss schedule.
The point he's making is we'd be struggling for defensive talent if he retired after 2024.
Likely would be struggling for offensive talent as well. Why do i think that? B/c no one runs leach's system anymore. So whoever you hired would be a pretty big change of system.
UNLESS YOU HIRED A COACH WHO HAD NEVER EVEN BEEN A TRUE COORDINATOR BEFORE (think Spurrier). And that wouldn't be real smart either. Might work. Might not.
Then you are telling me Mike Leach wasn't smart enough to start him over Will Rogers?
IIRC, Mullen was also annually campaigning for other HC jobs, which was not great for morale.
And Jackie lost it because he also got sloppy with the NCAA stuff while also losing.
Leach was a good stopgap hire for the time and situation, and I think we would've been fine moving on from him in year 5 or so with some planning. The guy freaking dropped dead. That was a big deal.
2022 was his second and final year in the program. Leach chose Locke over Sawyer and all but told him to move on
You bring up an interesting point.
Sawyer Robertson entered the transfer portal in January 4.
Spurrier didn’t leave until January 6.
No offensive coach was hired before then.
paidtoshill? You have a high opinion of me I see.
And we took him away from a job he was more capable at. And he took a pay cut. One of the single weirdest things I have ever witnessed. So glad he’s gone and I hope he never steps foot on campus again.
Actually it was one of four teams in school history to win 9, win the egg bowl, finish in top 20 and win a bowl game. But Leach was a gimmick and bad hire*. Sometimes you get what you ask for.
Jackie tried to get the Tampa Bay job in 1992. I'm not sure if he was a serious candidate. Then he tried to get the Bama job in 2000 and was seriously considered.
He didn't get the Bama job and his wife got sick, the "balloon popped".
Last edited:
There have been 3 signing day windows and 3 or 4 major transfer portal windows that have come and gone since Leach passed away. 6-7 chances to bring in 15-25 guys each time. We still have very little talent. Saying that’s Leach’s issue in 2025 when he’s been in the ground for 3 years is comical. Hell, it isn’t even an Arnett problem anymore.
It’s never been easier to quickly rebuild your roster to get what you need for a new system…..whatever that system is. Yet we have little talent. It’s because we aren’t willing or able to pay for elite portal guys and HS recruits, and up to this point we have also employed a joke of a DC who has yet to put anyone in position to succeed. None of that is on Leach.
This right here. Any resemblance of the offense we ran prior to him would have made a huge difference.
The reset isn’t just with the system. It’s with the culture, the expectations, and the identity as well. Sometimes its a positive change, sometimes not.
In 2018, Joe Moorhead took over for Mullen, and largely did just as you suggested. Few people realize this, but he actually ran the ball in 2018 even more often than Mullen did in 2017. There were tweaks, of course. More options per playcall, more downfield shots. different reads, etc. But at its core, it was still a spread offense with a large emphasis on the power option and utilizing the QB in the running game. Go back and check the stats and playcall %’s for run / pass if you don’t believe me. The defensive identity also changed, it actually got way better.
But, the results weren’t really quite the same, were they? Because the playcalling identity was different, the culture got soft, discipline took a hit, etc. Because there is ALWAYS a reset of some type when you have a new head coach.
Easier said than done. And much harder right now than it ever has been at MSU.
One thing in the article he said was we had $500k in our total NIL budget for all sports. I’m pretty sure that is incorrect.
Well we went low with Moorhead when we were at our lowest point. Cohen thought he was a genius. We could have gotten a lot of good coaches when Mullen left and we didn't.
A baseball coach had no business leading a multi million dollar sports business
TLDR all
Joe morehead tried to stick a square peg in a round hole with what he tried to get fits to do as a QB.
Would the percentage of run vs pass plays for 2018 still be higher if you took the 2018 Auburn game out of the equation? I know that sounds like cherry picking stats, but that game was an anomaly. We ran the ball like 55 times vs. 17 passes. It was kind of awesome, but it was never duplicated.
I really was high on Moorhead when he was hired, but I really expected him to tweak his offense to match Fitz's strengths. Against Auburn, he did. But in all the other games Fitz usually looked scared to just tuck the ball and run. I often wondered if his ankle was more of an issue than anyone would admit...but then there was that Auburn game when he ran for 195.
As high as I was on Moorhead, I still only predicted a 9 win season because he was a first year coach. After the K State game, I lowered my prediction to 8, because he didnt change his offense for Fitz. ..but even then I never expected his offense to be so disorganized and frustrating.
Fitz had 59 more carries in 2018 than 2017.
Fitz had 137 more rushing yards in 2018 than in 2017….and ran for over 1,000 yards. Did all that despite missing the best stat-padding opportunity on the schedule (the opener against SFA).
Fitz threw five FEWER passes in 2018 than he did in 2017. His total passing yards, passing yards per game, and passer rating were all virtually identical between 2017 and 2018. His TD / INT ratio improved from 15/11 to 16/9.
Reality doesn’t match your perception that he was running some drastically different system, or was a vastly different player. The offense as a whole was more inefficient for a variety of reasons. But Fitz was largely doing the all the same things he did for the previous 3 seasons.
I was slightly off.
We passed 36.11% of the time in 2017, which was 114th in the country.
We passed 39.7% of the time in 2018, which was 112th in the country.
So we did pass ever so slightly more often in 2018 than 2017, but not by much. And when accounting for how many more negative game scripts we had in 2018 that required passing, its kind of negligible.
We passed on 23% of play calls in that Auburn game, which was lower than usual, but we also had a double digit lead for most of the 2nd half, and a 7-13 point lead for all of the 2nd half. I don’t think it was that big of an anomoly. Certainly nothing that would have put us at like 45-50% passing for the year if it didn’t happen. 50th percentile for passing play call % that season was Rutgers at 46.57%. They were 65th nationally. We were nowhere close to that mark.
Furthermore, in 2019 when Fitz was gone, and Moorhead had all his own hand picked QB’s, what did he do? He ran it even more often than he did with Fitz at QB. Pass play call % was 39.18% which was 113th in the country.
Do you have access to the internet, or history books? Neither the transfer portal nor NIL existed when Leach was hired.
So you are basically saying Dan Mullen wouldn’t have performed better than Moorhead. Got it.
2017
48th in total offense
27th in defense
2018
71st in total offense
2nd in defense
Do you honestly think Mullen wouldn’t have been better in 2018 than slow joe? Is that your stance?
The transfer window for the spring didn't open until April, but he had already made his intentions known with the staff. And this is common knowledge. He ultimately transferred out in January because a 30 day window opened up for him with the coaching change.
“And this is common knowledge” , always the preamble for some made up BS, trust me bro
you trolling or just a habitual liar ?
“Robertson spent two years at Mississippi State before tragedy struck when Leach passed away in 2022. With his whole reason for playing with the Bulldogs gone, Robertson entered the transfer portal and wound up at Baylor, where his cousin, Jarrett Stidham, played quarterback. Choosing Baylor raised eyebrows, most notably Stan’s, who was surprised that his son picked a school that wasn’t running the Air Raid offense.”
Last edited:
NCAA created the first formal NIL committee in 2019. You have to be an absolute idiot as an athletic director to believe NIL was not a formality when making a coaching hire in 2020. Turns out, Cohen was certainly an idiot. He was not forward-thinking and every rumor has become fact with how he mismanaged NIL as AD. Leach was a poor hire for 2020s NCAA football. Good coach though
I am not speculating. My source was someone on staff. Your source is clearly someone who was full of ****.
But carry on.
My source is Dave Campbells Texas Football monthly from August 2025, your source is something you just made up. Are you in sales ? Used cars ?
Why do you do this to yourself?
Are you one of those guys who pays hookers to make fun of your dlck? Seems like you enjoy getting humiliated.
Find a friend who you trust to tell you when to log off.
Sad, this is the end result of a guy who gets called out on his BS. Pro tip, don’t make things up that are clearly not connected to reality.
there are many other lies you could make up, Sawyer is still giving interviews, just last month, demonstrating how much Leach influenced him and how fortunate he was to have played for him. I’m sorry the program is in a shambles, but maybe next time don’t let Arnett and some clueless boosters blow up the program.
2-10 is not a delusion. your trust me bro, made up fairy tales that can’t stand the light of day would qualify as delusions.
Your and idiot. Saban didn't like NIL either. Ask Alabama if they'd take him back.