Ed Orgeron returns to Oxford next Saturday.
That fact alone makes the upcoming week one of the more interesting ones on Ole Miss' schedule.
What's coming, frankly, is predictable. Orgeron, now the associate head coach/defensive line coach/recruiting coordinator at Tennessee, will decline interview requests of every journalist not named Bruce Feldman. Ole Miss players will try to say as little as possible about their time with their former coach, but some won't be able to help themselves. Anyone who's been around the program the past couple of years know the emotions regarding Orgeron still run strong.
File Photo
Former Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron, shown here during the 2007 season, will return to Oxford on Saturday as Tennessee's associate head coach/defensive line coach/recruiting coordinator.
Take Ole Miss defensive end Kentrell Lockett, an Orgeron recruit, for example.
"It's a big game for bowls, but it's a big game for character and I would say pride," Lockett said. "It's about getting this nasty taste from the past two years about this guy. It's kind of like a revenge factor, not necessarily to him but to the team that he's associated with now. It's going to be a little personal.
"That was said in the locker room. It's personal now. It's a game, but it's on a whole different level. There's a a personal aspect to the game. A lot more things are on the line than actually just a game and bowls and all this. ...Great guy, but he just wasn't that head coach. He was a great D-line coach but he wasn't that head coach. I haven't talked to him since then. I might get a chance to talk to him after the game Saturday, might not, but life goes on, you know?"
Added wide receiver Shay Hodge: Coach O never did anything to me, but the way I saw him treat some people, I know some guys are going to come out with a real fire in their belly and get after them pretty bad."
Meanwhile, there will be an undercurrent of Orgeron bashing in various media outlets. Memphis-based sports talk show host Chris Vernon's hilarious Orgeron parody will be played incessantly on talk shows all over the Southeast. The awkward Hummer ad, the one in which Orgeron tells the dealer, "Tell 'em about, JoJo," will be dug up and laughed at. Message boards will be filled with stories from Orgeron's colorful tenure, some embellished and some not.
Forgive me while I don't participate, at least not in a one-sided, partisan way. It's not that I'm an Orgeron fan. I don't harbor any particular personal feelings, one way or the other, toward the man.
One simply can't defend Orgeron or his tenure at Ole Miss. It's indefensible. James Carville and Mary Matalin aren't good enough to spin it, and I'm certainly not. Orgeron won three of 24 Southeastern Conference games in three seasons, including an 0-8 campaign in 2007. By any standard, that's a disaster. I won't prop him up as some great recruiting machine, either, at least not at Ole Miss, for the results simply don't support that statement.
Orgeron inherited a depleted roster and began the process of rebuilding it. Yes, he recruited some fantastic players _ Michael Oher, Mike Wallace, BenJarvus Green-Ellis, Greg Hardy and Lockett, to name a few _ but he left gaping holes on the Rebels' roster. One can't be hired as a chef and serve a spectacular appetizer, an undercooked entrée, no salad, bad sides and an adequate dessert and expect praise from the clientele. Never has a coach built more capital for pursuing but not signing elite players. Keiland Williams, Joe McKnight and others flirted with Ole Miss but didn't sign, yet somehow, a portion of the Rebels' fan base gave Orgeron credit for trying. There's no such thing as second place in recruiting. You either sign the player or you don't.
Orgeron's program-management skills were clearly lacking. For example, Daverin Geralds and Cordera Eason basically lost a year of eligibility each to poor planning. Ole Miss' three-scholarship APR hit can be tagged on Orgeron's tenure as well, and from all accounts, the loss of scholarships was mitigated by some serious hard work in that department by the current staff. Orgeron had never been a head coach before arriving in Oxford, and it showed immediately.
His failure was predictable, and in fairness, it was predicted. Orgeron was never even a coordinator at the college level. He had recruited to Miami and Southern Cal, working for some of the best coaches in the business in the process. Recruiting to Ole Miss as the head coach was and is a different animal.
However, Orgeron has been made the scapegoat far too many times. In the end, he's guilty of one thing and one thing only: He accepted a job that provided a pay raise, a jump in stature and career advancement, likely hoping he'd learn on the job. Orgeron worked hard. He poured his heart into the job, recruited as diligently as one can. It just didn't work.
Orgeron was fired quite unceremoniously one day after losing at Mississippi State in November 2007. Whether the decision was made before that game or not can be debated, though it's pointless. Days later, Ole Miss anted up and hired an established head coach with a decade's worth of experience in the SEC. Houston Nutt, after beating Northern Arizona Saturday night in Oxford, is 15-7 overall and 7-6 in the SEC as Ole Miss' head man. He's far more equipped than Orgeron to handle what is a very challenging position.
The problem, at least in my opinion, with making Orgeron the fall guy for his tenure is he wasn't the one that flew to Los Angeles and offered him the job. He wasn't the guy who, upon firing David Cutcliffe, announced that Ole Miss was seeking an experienced head coach and implied that the school would only consider someone who fell into that category.
It's not Orgeron's fault that Ron Zook's name surfaced as a candidate or that Bobby Petrino's and Dennis Erickson's names popped up as well. All were and are established head coaches. Erickson, then the head coach of the San Francisco 49ers, was clearly the choice of some of Ole Miss' top power brokers. He was interviewed by then-chancellor Robert Khayat, and from all accounts, it went badly. One day later, more than two weeks after Cutcliffe's dismissal, Ole Miss/Khayat hired Orgeron. One simply can't blame Orgeron for one of the most poorly-handled coaching searches in recent history.
Orgeron's hiring was a reach, and that's an understatement. There have been other reaches in SEC history, such as LSU's hiring of Jerry Stovall after Bo Rein died in a plane crash and Alabama's selection of Mike Shula to replace Mike Price after Price was fired following an embarrassing episode in Pensacola, Fla. Ole Miss officials were advised by the very search firm it contracted not to hire Orgeron, but they chose to ignore that advice and proceed anyway. Egos are powerful things.
Amazingly and along those lines, the people who hired Orgeron remain on the UM payroll today and have never really been held accountable or adequately explained themselves in the wake of their inexcusable bungling of the entire process. That fact, in and of itself, speaks volumes.
Orgeron's tenure was embarrassing for the university, hit the bottom line hard and created a hole that it still being climbed out of today. A lot of the blame for that belongs on Orgeron, but not all of it, not anything close to all of it.
