re: Will a rising tide lift all boats?

No.

Malzahn was never coming here. I believe that he genuinely wanted to come here back when Arkansas had an opening after Nutt got fired. I think the continuous rejection in the job interviews made him bitter against Arkansas.

When he got the job at Auburn, he had no regrets running the score up on Arkansas when had the chance which was plenty.

When he made his money and had his job secured at Auburn, the Arkansas job was open and he teased Arkansas the whole time. He got Auburn to spend more money than they should have and allowed Arkansas to waste valuable time in a coaching search when they should have went after more realistic candidates.

This country has a lot of good coaches at all different levels in college football. But Arkansas has tunnel vision in these searches and they ended up with a coach that had a losing record at SMU. Something is wrong here.

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Malzahn was never coming here.

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Until only a few years ago (I hope) Gus was the "White Whale" of Arkansas football.

If we bring him in we will win a national title!

But by the time we were looking at hiring him, his gimmick was already exposed. Teams had started to figure out how to beat his version of the Hurry Up Power Spread. If we had hired him when Nutt stepped down... we might could have built a talent base to cover up that folks were starting to sniff him out.

We didn't. We didn't hire a lot of guys, in their prime, who really wanted the job. Pete Carroll was all in on the job at one point. Barry Switzer.

Malzahn should had never been hired from Springdale to a power 5 job. Going from a high school coach to an OC job is extremely rare and that isn't the way it should be done. This caused anger and resentment with other coaches on the staff that took them years or decades to get those high level college positions.

They should have left Nutt to himself to succeed or fail on his own terms. Or they could have avoided the nonsense of both 06 and 07 seasons had they fired him after the 05 season. But of course Arkansas never makes it easy on themselves and had to drag out the drama and BS.

I posted this before and and I'll post it again in that Arkansas missed out on getting Butch Davis but Arkansas didn't pull the trigger on firing Nutt after the 05 season. Just think he could do in those 06 and 07 seasons, competent QB play, SEC champs or possibly in a title game. Darren McFadden rushes for over 2,000 yards rushing, wins the Heisman. Davis was always interested in coming back home but Arkansas never pursued him but made excuses and kept Nutt.

Another huge miss by Arkansas is not replacing Broyles with Terry Don Phillips you know the AD that hired Dabo that won a few titles at Clemson. But no everyone was in a hurry to throw the baby out with the bathwater in favor of Jeff Long.

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The BOT has a knack for stepping on their dicks.

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No truer words were ever spoken