patdog said:
laughing their asses off at them, just like Mississippi fans 4 years ago didn't realize the rest of the SEC was laughing their asses of at them. Of course, if Mississippi wins the West this year, they may have the last laugh after all. For all Orgeron's faults, and there are many, he did recruit almost every player who played for them last year and will play for them this year.
We knew damn well they were laughing at us, we just had to pretend we didn't care. It wasn't like we had a choice.
We laughed just as hard when they selected Croom as your coach, it just wasn't politically correct for the rest of the league to laugh as hard as they did at Orgeron. In hindsight, Croom was the worse hire if you look at recruiting and coaching. At least Orgeron did bring in some decent players. However, Croom did go to a bowl.
Regarding the comment about Orgeron recruiting "almost every player who played for them last year and will play for them this year"....I hear this from other fans quite often, as if its a slap in the face against Nutt (not that you are doing this). My question is...Who else would have recruited them? David Cutcliffe has been gone since 2004. Nutt just started.
I like the fact that Nutt used what he had available. Too many times I've seen a coach run off veteran players or start freshmen over underclassmen because they are "his players". Just not a smart tactic. You guys went through that. We did to under Orgeron. Both coaches may have been slightly better had they used their resources correctly. In my opinion, coaches who run off good players from the past regime are just setting up excuse for themselves. If they don't have success in the first two years, they can say they didn't have the personel to "run their system" because the previous coach recruited so poorly or recruited badseeds. We saw Croom do this, we saw Orgeron do this, and Petrino did it last year.