Boom..........this. You know who would be a great fit here? Who has SEC experience that would fit and from what I can tell as an arm chair coach would fit the personality of these 18 to 20-something year old players with all the things listed above?............I'm leaning Freeze. Just watching his teams (both at Ole Miss and the youtube replays of Liberty) all his players have fire and just look like they enjoy the game and love playing for him. But I agree.........fitting certain situations is a must.
To me, this is a watershed moment in the history of this program. We have found ourselves before in that spot where we knew we were going to have to find a new coach; but not once has there been such an obvious, inescapable, inarguable (by anyone sane) solution right in front of our eyes, begging to be taken.
None of the other times in the last thirteen years when we needed to make a coaching change was there a coach with the accomplishments of Hugh Freeze, who also just happened to be coaching at a school many levels below what his talent warrants, clearly biding his time for a better opportunity. When you add the fact that Freeze has called our very job his dream job, the chasm between him and any other candidate we may have considered in the last four searches grows wide indeed. I'm not including Gruden in all of this because he was out of coaching entirely when we may or may not have had a shot at him, and depending on who you believe, he may or may not have seriously been interested; but his relative interest wasn't hard to gauge because he wasn't doing anything remotely related to college football, i.e. he wasn't trying to further his career as a college coach, whereas Freeze is.
There isn't just a quantifiable difference between the coaching ability of Freeze and our current coach; there's as much difference as there is between a Porsche and a Yugo, between an astronaut and a McDonald's cashier, between Seattle Slew and a gimpy mule. Opportunities like this don't come along every day, or even every decade; we haven't had one the like of this since we began our slide.
Everyone on here likes to assume a fatalistic attitude as though we as fans have no impact on what transpires. I wonder if a week from now the athletic department got 100,000 e-mails from fans informing them they would not buy another ticket to Neyland Stadium or spend any money whatsoever with this program until Pruitt is fired and Freeze is hired, if they would still feel so empowered to blithely ignore us and run the program in the cavalier way they have for the last thirteen years? If some of these power boosters who think this football program is their personal toy that they can do with as they see fit, suddenly were confronted with the possibility that we might really all go away and leave them with their little plaything that would suddenly become pretty meaningless, would they continue in their arrogance? If people really stopped coming to the games, and three years from now the program had to drop down to D-II, where would that leave the power boosters? How would they feel then about their precious egos that right now they're clearly putting before the good of this program?
It's just unconscionable that one of the small handful of the very best coaches in college football has made clear that this is his dream job, and we're at a moment in our history where we need him very, very badly, and the people with the power to do it haven't already made it happen. The massive spike in revenue from hiring Freeze would obliterate the extra money we spent to get him within one season, probably less time than that; if we keep the imposter that we presently have, the lost revenue will make buyouts look cheap a year from now, especially when Freeze is hired by Auburn and immediately proceeds to run us out of the stadium, and within a year or two is in the playoff.
Here's my challenge to you power boosters: do you really care like you say you do about this program, or do you just care about your ego and being right, which is the only possible explanation of why you would not fire Pruitt now? If you really bleed orange and this football program means as much to you as the Alabama program meant to its boosters when they didn't take no for an answer from Saban, walk the walk and go get us the coach that you know as well as we do would have us in the playoff within four years. Because if you just sit back and allow this buffoon we have now to run this thing further into the ground even than the last two bozos did, and Freeze goes on to be hired by one of the other teams in this conference (which you know as well as we do will happen) and then makes it to the playoff with that team instead of us, then you really aren't a friend of this program, and your actions will have proven it.
