Random Question of the Day

by John Expat on Nov 19, 2008 7:01 PM CST in Bobby Petrino

Regular readers of this blog will probably recall that Will "Boom MF" Muschamp, who was Auburn's defensive coordinator at the time, came *this* close to hired as Arkansas head coach last December. I personally was pretty into the idea of his candidacy at the time, although obviously was quite excited when we nabbed Bobby Petrino instead. Muschamp, of course, didn't mourn too long and promptly moved on to the DC job at Texas.

Yesterday Texas made the somewhat oddly-timed move of announcing that Muschamp will be Mack Brown's replacement on that presumably distant day that he's finished with the Longhorns (and UT fans are psyched).

So, that led me to the following hypothetical: what would the long-term future of the program look like if we'd hired Muschamp instead? Better? Worse? Doesn't matter?

I know I'll probably get some "that's dumb...quit living in the past" replies to this, and that's fair. Just to be clear, I'm quite happy with the way things turned out. But, on a slow Wednesday I'm also not above engaging in random hypothetical thoughts just for fun. If you feel the same way, post your insights in the comments field below.

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I might just be a homer, but I don’t think in the long run things would have been better with him. I think things would be good, better than Nutt, but not that much better. At least we would actually have a scary defense, something that really was lacking during the Nutt era.

I think this year, if he picked a good OC, then we would probably be bowl eligible. I think that our offense, although not producing as many yards, would produce about the same scores. I also think that the defense would have been good enough to not let leads slip away, and not let other teams score early or as often. On the recruiting end, he would have gotten some good defensive players, but a lot of those offensive players that are going to make the bulk of the offense in the next couple of years probably wouldn’t come here.

So I think we would have had short term success with Muschamp, but I think we will have longer and better success with Petrino.

by CLO on Nov 20, 2008 9:58 AM CST reply actions

Muschamp, hmmm. When former firey defensive coordinators become head coaches, you could get someone like Nick Saban, OR you could get the Keith Burns of the world, just total flops as head coaches. The Nick Sabans being the much rarer of the two. I think time will have to tell where Mr. Boom! is going to fall on that scale. But if it is Texas, as it looks to be, then it will be a center stage big success or a big failure. I, however, just wonder how patient this guy is. He doesn’t strike me as a patient sort. From all reports, he was ready to take the head coaching job at Arkansas. Is he really going to wait four, six, eight years for the Texas job to open up? Has he been reading Mack Brown’s medical charts? haha. Personally, I am glad we got Petrino who came to us with head coaching experience already on his resume.

by KevinHog on Nov 20, 2008 11:45 AM CST reply actions