I don't normally copy and paste non-RG articles on here but desperate times call for desperate measures. This is the best piece I've read on the current state of OM football. Won't say where it came from but the author's initials are BG and he's easily the best TOS has to offer. Don't know how BG sits at the same table with CR and YP.
Here ya go.
"College football is a results-oriented business.
To borrow an oft-used phrase from former Ole Miss basketball coach Andy Kennedy, you are what the numbers say you are. And for Matt Luke, the numbers, especially after an abysmal 21-20 loss to in-state rival Mississippi State on Thursday, aren’t good.
First, allow me to preface the next few paragraphs with an obvious but needed reminder. This isn’t personal. By all accounts, Luke is well-liked by most everyone he comes into contact with, from his players and the media to the fans, recruits, etc. For whatever it’s worth, we all know he cares deeply about Ole Miss; the university’s sports information department has made sure to remind everyone as often as possible.
But after a 2017 season in which he led the Rebels, as interim head coach, to a 6-6 (3-5 SEC) finish, his teams have gotten progressively worse. Ole Miss, inexplicably, was 5-7 (1-7) last year, despite a roster that featured a wealth of NFL talent on offense, namely A.J. Brown, D.K. Metcalf and Dawson Knox.
(A brief aside: Knox, a third-round selection of the Buffalo Bills, never scored a touchdown in his Rebel career. He has two in his rookie season.)
Some would argue Luke shouldn’t be held responsible for 2018. They’d likely deflect blame to then-defensive coordinator Wesley McGriff and one of the worst defenses, statistically, in the country. But Luke wasn’t forced to keep McGriff. Or offensive coordinator Phil Longo — he of the chasing-grass directive, a philosophy that resulted in one of the most egregious examples of squandered talent the program has seen or will ever see.
Luke took the noble route. He felt he couldn’t in good conscience fire two coordinators he believed helped him get the full-time job in the first place. He thought it only right all his coaches have a clean slate. To this day, he still employs Jacob Peeler, Derrick Nix and Freddie Roach — all holdovers from Hugh Freeze’s Ole Miss staff.
Nobility, commendable as it is, gets coaches fired. College football is a cutthroat business. The failures of McGriff and Longo are ultimately the responsibility of Luke. Such is life in the big chair.
The 2019 season was different. He made his own hires after axing McGriff a day after an embarrassing loss to Mississippi State this time last year and not putting up a fight to keep Longo. Longo jumped at a lateral move to North Carolina.
Luke set out to hire one of Mike MacIntyre or Pete Goulding as defensive coordinator. MacIntyre got the nod, and the former Colorado head coach did admirable work in his debut season. He pulled Ole Miss out of the dump heap and at least made the Rebels respectable defensively. His No. 1 target for offensive coordinator was Will Hall. He moved too slowly, however. Hall was hired by Tulane, so when Ole Miss finally had an opening, Luke’s pursuit of Hall became complicated. Rich Rodriguez was flown in for a visit. He left without an offer. Luke said afterwards he wanted to take his time and weigh his options.
Maybe he preferred to wait on clarity with Hall. Regardless, he was pressed by a few in and around the program to go ahead and jump on Rodriguez while he could. Why wait on Hall, they opined, when one of the best offensive minds in the sport — at least in the 2000s and early 2010s — was there for the taking?
Ole Miss underwent a shift in identity — to, at best, mixed results. The Nasty Wideouts (N.W.O.) all but disappeared, save for sophomore Elijah Moore, whose ridiculous reenactment of DK Metcalf’s touchdown celebration against these same Bulldogs in 2017 forced a longer game-tying extra-point attempt for scuffling placekicker Luke Logan with four seconds remaining. He missed. Mississippi State celebrated. And the Rebels went out with a whimper.
Four wins. Eight losses.
In three seasons, Luke is 15-21 overall and 6-17 in SEC games. He’s 2-9 the last two years against the SEC West. Both of his wins came against hapless Arkansas, and one was the direct result of the Razorbacks losing their starting quarterback to injury. Assuming Ole Miss played in four 50/50 games (which might be generous) in 2019, Luke was 0-4.
For the sake of argument, Ed Orgeron, now leading championship contender LSU, was 10-25 in his three-year Ole Miss tenure.
Throughout the year, Luke often spoke of the youth of his roster. He pointed to quarterback John Rhys Plumlee and Jerrion Ealy and Snoop Conner and Deantre Prince and Jay Stanley and A.J. Finley. On and on and on. He said Ole Miss was coming, that it was close. The kids were getting valuable experience. Ole Miss is on the way.
But close isn’t good enough. It can’t be good enough. When it becomes good enough, well, pack up the truck because the program has entered the abyss of endless mediocrity, of striving for nothing more than competitiveness. Lest we forget, Ole Miss and Mississippi State were playing for Access Bowl spots five years ago. Five.
Ole Miss went through a six-year NCAA colonoscopy. The program was effectively given the modern-day death penalty, including a two-year bowl ban and significant scholarship and recruiting restrictions. This season was the first the Rebels had with a full allotment of scholarship players. They were hammered, so Luke’s resume should be judged under a unique lens.
That’s all true.
But Luke was directly responsible for the 2018 recruiting class. Matt Corral was in at quarterback in the game’s last two drives — magnifying what has been nothing short of baffling quarterback usage from Luke and staff all season. Granted, Corral found Moore for the final score, but he was intercepted on his first drive, and they’ve clearly made their choice with Plumlee. He started against Cal and every game after.
Yet Luke didn’t trust him enough as a passer to go to him with the game on the line, not to mention Corral is likely headed to the transfer portal. Rumors abound. They’ve only gotten louder. He could soon be headed west, back home to play closer to his native California. Perhaps Luke talks him into staying. I’ve given up trying to understand Luke’s inconsistent two-quarterback system.
Miles Battle was the Rebels’ No. 1 wide receiver target. He’s already hit the portal. Jalen Cunningham has yet to make a meaningful contribution for an offensive line — Luke’s former position group — that featured three new starters and had little or no depth. Same for Hamilton Hall. Kevontae Ruggs transferred. Demarcus Gregory is gone, too. Vernon Dasher disappeared. Where’s JaKorey Hawkins? Jonathan Hess? Scottie Phillips was nearly a 1,000-yard rusher as a junior. He was healthy Thursday. He played third fiddle to Ealy and Conner.
The excuse of Luke needing to stack a few more recruiting classes on top of the impressive 2019 haul just rings hollow. Ole Miss fans showed their displeasure with the on-the-field returns with game after game of empty seats.
Rumors swirled pregame Mississippi State and Joe Moorehead were heading towards a split regardless of the outcome of the Battle of the Golden Egg. We’ll see. But let’s assume the Bulldogs make a move and hire their top target, rumored to be Lafayette’s Billy Napier. They’ll have decided, in essence, that an eight-win season followed by a six-win season and two bowl trips isn’t good enough. The bar, in such a scenario, is higher. And they've been to 10 straight bowls. Think about that.
And Ole Miss wonders why its fans are frustrated? Ole Miss hasn't bowled in four seasons.
“We’ve got to get out in front of people,” athletics director Keith Carter told me recently. “I think that’s going to be one of the most important things. We’ve got to get out there, we’ve got to be visible. I think our folks are looking for someone who’s going to come out and be real and be honest and be transparent. That’s the only way I know to be, sometimes to a fault. I put things out there that maybe I shouldn’t at times.
“But for me, I want people to know I have the best interest of Ole Miss at heart. I’m going to make every decision that’s going to be in the best interest of this department and this university. So we’ve got to get out there and, candidly, win some people back. For whatever reason, it’s been a four or five-year period here where we’ve just had so much negativity. For us, we’ve got to get out and we’ve got to talk about the future and we’ve got talk about getting away from some of that negativity and bringing everybody back into the fold. I’ve been here a long time. We’ve got to get out and get people back pulling that rope in the same direction and wanting Ole Miss to be great.”
Uh, the negativity, first and foremost, stems from losing. Ole Miss fans support a winner. Look at basketball; Rebel fans are showing up like never before. If the issue here in making a decision on Luke is purely based on money, hey, I get it. OK. Ole Miss Spirit publisher Chuck Rounsaville reported it would cost some $17 million to buy out Luke and his assistants. No small chunk of change, to be sure, and defensible to a point. But if that’s the case, Ole Miss leadership should just come out and say as much.
Because, honestly, what can Ole Miss football sell right now? Recruiting is going well enough, I suppose. The Rebels have the No. 23 class in the country, according to 247Sports. But they’re No. 10 in the SEC. Worrying about a short-term hit — one recruiting cycle — when the long-term outlook currently looks bleak isn’t smart business.
To be clear, I’m not so much advocating for Luke to necessarily be fired. But why is it such a given that he’s getting 2020? Further playing devil’s advocate, if Luke got his admitted ‘dream job’ by winning the Egg Bowl (which came about, let’s be real, because Nick Fitzgerald got hurt), stands to reason he could be fired by losing it, right?
I’m simply asking the question. He’s lost two in a row. Mississippi State could have named its score last year. The 2019 version had its own set of embarrassments.
“You’ve got to look at every program individually,” Carter said. “We have a standard, and we’re going to have a standard, that we want to finish top-half of our league. That should be a minimum goal every year in every sport, is that we want to finish in the top-half of our league, and that’s very attainable. But we have to look at each program individually and where they are in their program, what their resources look like and all those different things. In given years, we can win championships. We’ve done that. We have opportunities to win championships, and that’s from football all the way down to rifle. We want to compete for championships.
“But if you look at what we’re dealing with in football right now, there’s so many factors in play that are not in play in our other programs. When you talk about the NCAA issue we’ve been through — probation, lack of scholarships, negative recruiting on the recruiting trail — there’s so many things I think a lot of people have just, frankly, forgotten about. You look across the country and there’s programs that are struggling worse than us that haven’t been through anything like we’ve been through. We’re going to hold each program to a high standard. This is the SEC. We have great resources. We have the opportunity to compete at a very high level, and that’s going to be the expectation. Coach Luke is our coach. We’re excited about the direction of the program. Would we have liked to have won more games this year? One hundred percent. Matt Luke would be the first person to tell you that. With football, we’ve got to give them some more time, keep stacking these recruiting classes on top of each other and eventually things are going to turn our way.”
No one’s forgotten about anything. Luke, meanwhile, hasn’t finished better than sixth in the West.
I don’t know if Ole Miss football has more time. There’s nothing worse for a program than fan apathy, and the university didn’t help itself with its donors and fanbase when it went through three “national” searches and hired the guy down the hall all three times.
I firmly believe Carter will be a great Ole Miss athletics director. Hand to God. He’s prepared 11 years for the opportunity. It’s unfortunate his hire was the last of the three searches. He’s far more qualified for the job he was ultimately given than either of chancellor Glenn Boyce (who was at the Egg Bowl!) or Luke.
(Another aside: Please direct all sightings of Glenn Boyce to @SpiritBen. Thank you for your service.)
Carter’s proven he can make a tough decision if he needs to. He didn’t roll over Mike Bianco’s contract after the Rebels, in June, fell a game shy of their second trip to the College World Series since the 70s. He cited a need to get to Omaha.
Why isn’t Luke being held to a similar standard, acknowledging, of course, the previous NCAA sanctions? Heck, there’s an argument to be made there’s no better time to make a change, considering the program is back on equal footing and precious few openings in the SEC.
But I digress. It’s been proven that half measures, in the end, don’t work. If Bianco wasn’t Carter’s guy, he should have fired him. By not rolling him over, he created a recruiting advantage for competing schools to sell recruits — the belief that leadership doesn’t believe in Head Coach A, so do you, Johnny Recruit, really want to go there? Either roll a coach over or fire him/her. Former chancellor Jeff Vitter attempted to toe the delicate line of rolling over Kennedy but dropping his buyout to $0. Kennedy, of course, didn’t go for it. He was fired the following spring. Does Carter go for something similar? I don’t envy his position.
The Matt Luke dilemma is his first real test. He did the right thing coming out strong in support of Luke at his introductory press conference, as well as a few days later on the Talk of Champions podcast, available in iTunes, SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts.
(Sorry. Always be selling.)
An A.D. is always supposed to show a united front. But whether or not Luke is at the reins for Ole Miss football in 2020 shouldn’t be a slam dunk. Far from it. Those in charge should have a real, substantive conversation.
Again, nothing personal, but results are all that matter. Carter said Luke checks every box but wins and losses. Problem there is all coaches are judged on is wins and losses.
And Luke is losing far more than he’s winning.
“Matt and I will sit down after the season and we’ll talk about next year (and) how we make the program better,” Carter said. “How do we get over the hump in some of these 50/50 games that we weren’t able to do this year. Those are things we’ll evaluate. I’m going to bet coach Luke’s going to be his hardest critic. He’s going to self-evaluate, he’s going to look at the program and look at who we’re recruiting and who we’re playing and do everything in his power to get us over that hump. We want to win.
“We know this is a win/loss business. We’ve got to get there. He expects that, we expect that and next year’s going to be a big year. But I’m very confident we’re going to go into next year with a lot of confidence and we’re going to go in there with another recruiting class stacked on top of this great freshman class that’s had a tremendous year and I see really positive things next year.”
Carter made these statements three days ago. Then Thanksgiving happened".
Here ya go.
"College football is a results-oriented business.
To borrow an oft-used phrase from former Ole Miss basketball coach Andy Kennedy, you are what the numbers say you are. And for Matt Luke, the numbers, especially after an abysmal 21-20 loss to in-state rival Mississippi State on Thursday, aren’t good.
First, allow me to preface the next few paragraphs with an obvious but needed reminder. This isn’t personal. By all accounts, Luke is well-liked by most everyone he comes into contact with, from his players and the media to the fans, recruits, etc. For whatever it’s worth, we all know he cares deeply about Ole Miss; the university’s sports information department has made sure to remind everyone as often as possible.
But after a 2017 season in which he led the Rebels, as interim head coach, to a 6-6 (3-5 SEC) finish, his teams have gotten progressively worse. Ole Miss, inexplicably, was 5-7 (1-7) last year, despite a roster that featured a wealth of NFL talent on offense, namely A.J. Brown, D.K. Metcalf and Dawson Knox.
(A brief aside: Knox, a third-round selection of the Buffalo Bills, never scored a touchdown in his Rebel career. He has two in his rookie season.)
Some would argue Luke shouldn’t be held responsible for 2018. They’d likely deflect blame to then-defensive coordinator Wesley McGriff and one of the worst defenses, statistically, in the country. But Luke wasn’t forced to keep McGriff. Or offensive coordinator Phil Longo — he of the chasing-grass directive, a philosophy that resulted in one of the most egregious examples of squandered talent the program has seen or will ever see.
Luke took the noble route. He felt he couldn’t in good conscience fire two coordinators he believed helped him get the full-time job in the first place. He thought it only right all his coaches have a clean slate. To this day, he still employs Jacob Peeler, Derrick Nix and Freddie Roach — all holdovers from Hugh Freeze’s Ole Miss staff.
Nobility, commendable as it is, gets coaches fired. College football is a cutthroat business. The failures of McGriff and Longo are ultimately the responsibility of Luke. Such is life in the big chair.
The 2019 season was different. He made his own hires after axing McGriff a day after an embarrassing loss to Mississippi State this time last year and not putting up a fight to keep Longo. Longo jumped at a lateral move to North Carolina.
Luke set out to hire one of Mike MacIntyre or Pete Goulding as defensive coordinator. MacIntyre got the nod, and the former Colorado head coach did admirable work in his debut season. He pulled Ole Miss out of the dump heap and at least made the Rebels respectable defensively. His No. 1 target for offensive coordinator was Will Hall. He moved too slowly, however. Hall was hired by Tulane, so when Ole Miss finally had an opening, Luke’s pursuit of Hall became complicated. Rich Rodriguez was flown in for a visit. He left without an offer. Luke said afterwards he wanted to take his time and weigh his options.
Maybe he preferred to wait on clarity with Hall. Regardless, he was pressed by a few in and around the program to go ahead and jump on Rodriguez while he could. Why wait on Hall, they opined, when one of the best offensive minds in the sport — at least in the 2000s and early 2010s — was there for the taking?
Ole Miss underwent a shift in identity — to, at best, mixed results. The Nasty Wideouts (N.W.O.) all but disappeared, save for sophomore Elijah Moore, whose ridiculous reenactment of DK Metcalf’s touchdown celebration against these same Bulldogs in 2017 forced a longer game-tying extra-point attempt for scuffling placekicker Luke Logan with four seconds remaining. He missed. Mississippi State celebrated. And the Rebels went out with a whimper.
Four wins. Eight losses.
In three seasons, Luke is 15-21 overall and 6-17 in SEC games. He’s 2-9 the last two years against the SEC West. Both of his wins came against hapless Arkansas, and one was the direct result of the Razorbacks losing their starting quarterback to injury. Assuming Ole Miss played in four 50/50 games (which might be generous) in 2019, Luke was 0-4.
For the sake of argument, Ed Orgeron, now leading championship contender LSU, was 10-25 in his three-year Ole Miss tenure.
Throughout the year, Luke often spoke of the youth of his roster. He pointed to quarterback John Rhys Plumlee and Jerrion Ealy and Snoop Conner and Deantre Prince and Jay Stanley and A.J. Finley. On and on and on. He said Ole Miss was coming, that it was close. The kids were getting valuable experience. Ole Miss is on the way.
But close isn’t good enough. It can’t be good enough. When it becomes good enough, well, pack up the truck because the program has entered the abyss of endless mediocrity, of striving for nothing more than competitiveness. Lest we forget, Ole Miss and Mississippi State were playing for Access Bowl spots five years ago. Five.
Ole Miss went through a six-year NCAA colonoscopy. The program was effectively given the modern-day death penalty, including a two-year bowl ban and significant scholarship and recruiting restrictions. This season was the first the Rebels had with a full allotment of scholarship players. They were hammered, so Luke’s resume should be judged under a unique lens.
That’s all true.
But Luke was directly responsible for the 2018 recruiting class. Matt Corral was in at quarterback in the game’s last two drives — magnifying what has been nothing short of baffling quarterback usage from Luke and staff all season. Granted, Corral found Moore for the final score, but he was intercepted on his first drive, and they’ve clearly made their choice with Plumlee. He started against Cal and every game after.
Yet Luke didn’t trust him enough as a passer to go to him with the game on the line, not to mention Corral is likely headed to the transfer portal. Rumors abound. They’ve only gotten louder. He could soon be headed west, back home to play closer to his native California. Perhaps Luke talks him into staying. I’ve given up trying to understand Luke’s inconsistent two-quarterback system.
Miles Battle was the Rebels’ No. 1 wide receiver target. He’s already hit the portal. Jalen Cunningham has yet to make a meaningful contribution for an offensive line — Luke’s former position group — that featured three new starters and had little or no depth. Same for Hamilton Hall. Kevontae Ruggs transferred. Demarcus Gregory is gone, too. Vernon Dasher disappeared. Where’s JaKorey Hawkins? Jonathan Hess? Scottie Phillips was nearly a 1,000-yard rusher as a junior. He was healthy Thursday. He played third fiddle to Ealy and Conner.
The excuse of Luke needing to stack a few more recruiting classes on top of the impressive 2019 haul just rings hollow. Ole Miss fans showed their displeasure with the on-the-field returns with game after game of empty seats.
Rumors swirled pregame Mississippi State and Joe Moorehead were heading towards a split regardless of the outcome of the Battle of the Golden Egg. We’ll see. But let’s assume the Bulldogs make a move and hire their top target, rumored to be Lafayette’s Billy Napier. They’ll have decided, in essence, that an eight-win season followed by a six-win season and two bowl trips isn’t good enough. The bar, in such a scenario, is higher. And they've been to 10 straight bowls. Think about that.
And Ole Miss wonders why its fans are frustrated? Ole Miss hasn't bowled in four seasons.
“We’ve got to get out in front of people,” athletics director Keith Carter told me recently. “I think that’s going to be one of the most important things. We’ve got to get out there, we’ve got to be visible. I think our folks are looking for someone who’s going to come out and be real and be honest and be transparent. That’s the only way I know to be, sometimes to a fault. I put things out there that maybe I shouldn’t at times.
“But for me, I want people to know I have the best interest of Ole Miss at heart. I’m going to make every decision that’s going to be in the best interest of this department and this university. So we’ve got to get out there and, candidly, win some people back. For whatever reason, it’s been a four or five-year period here where we’ve just had so much negativity. For us, we’ve got to get out and we’ve got to talk about the future and we’ve got talk about getting away from some of that negativity and bringing everybody back into the fold. I’ve been here a long time. We’ve got to get out and get people back pulling that rope in the same direction and wanting Ole Miss to be great.”
Uh, the negativity, first and foremost, stems from losing. Ole Miss fans support a winner. Look at basketball; Rebel fans are showing up like never before. If the issue here in making a decision on Luke is purely based on money, hey, I get it. OK. Ole Miss Spirit publisher Chuck Rounsaville reported it would cost some $17 million to buy out Luke and his assistants. No small chunk of change, to be sure, and defensible to a point. But if that’s the case, Ole Miss leadership should just come out and say as much.
Because, honestly, what can Ole Miss football sell right now? Recruiting is going well enough, I suppose. The Rebels have the No. 23 class in the country, according to 247Sports. But they’re No. 10 in the SEC. Worrying about a short-term hit — one recruiting cycle — when the long-term outlook currently looks bleak isn’t smart business.
To be clear, I’m not so much advocating for Luke to necessarily be fired. But why is it such a given that he’s getting 2020? Further playing devil’s advocate, if Luke got his admitted ‘dream job’ by winning the Egg Bowl (which came about, let’s be real, because Nick Fitzgerald got hurt), stands to reason he could be fired by losing it, right?
I’m simply asking the question. He’s lost two in a row. Mississippi State could have named its score last year. The 2019 version had its own set of embarrassments.
“You’ve got to look at every program individually,” Carter said. “We have a standard, and we’re going to have a standard, that we want to finish top-half of our league. That should be a minimum goal every year in every sport, is that we want to finish in the top-half of our league, and that’s very attainable. But we have to look at each program individually and where they are in their program, what their resources look like and all those different things. In given years, we can win championships. We’ve done that. We have opportunities to win championships, and that’s from football all the way down to rifle. We want to compete for championships.
“But if you look at what we’re dealing with in football right now, there’s so many factors in play that are not in play in our other programs. When you talk about the NCAA issue we’ve been through — probation, lack of scholarships, negative recruiting on the recruiting trail — there’s so many things I think a lot of people have just, frankly, forgotten about. You look across the country and there’s programs that are struggling worse than us that haven’t been through anything like we’ve been through. We’re going to hold each program to a high standard. This is the SEC. We have great resources. We have the opportunity to compete at a very high level, and that’s going to be the expectation. Coach Luke is our coach. We’re excited about the direction of the program. Would we have liked to have won more games this year? One hundred percent. Matt Luke would be the first person to tell you that. With football, we’ve got to give them some more time, keep stacking these recruiting classes on top of each other and eventually things are going to turn our way.”
No one’s forgotten about anything. Luke, meanwhile, hasn’t finished better than sixth in the West.
I don’t know if Ole Miss football has more time. There’s nothing worse for a program than fan apathy, and the university didn’t help itself with its donors and fanbase when it went through three “national” searches and hired the guy down the hall all three times.
I firmly believe Carter will be a great Ole Miss athletics director. Hand to God. He’s prepared 11 years for the opportunity. It’s unfortunate his hire was the last of the three searches. He’s far more qualified for the job he was ultimately given than either of chancellor Glenn Boyce (who was at the Egg Bowl!) or Luke.
(Another aside: Please direct all sightings of Glenn Boyce to @SpiritBen. Thank you for your service.)
Carter’s proven he can make a tough decision if he needs to. He didn’t roll over Mike Bianco’s contract after the Rebels, in June, fell a game shy of their second trip to the College World Series since the 70s. He cited a need to get to Omaha.
Why isn’t Luke being held to a similar standard, acknowledging, of course, the previous NCAA sanctions? Heck, there’s an argument to be made there’s no better time to make a change, considering the program is back on equal footing and precious few openings in the SEC.
But I digress. It’s been proven that half measures, in the end, don’t work. If Bianco wasn’t Carter’s guy, he should have fired him. By not rolling him over, he created a recruiting advantage for competing schools to sell recruits — the belief that leadership doesn’t believe in Head Coach A, so do you, Johnny Recruit, really want to go there? Either roll a coach over or fire him/her. Former chancellor Jeff Vitter attempted to toe the delicate line of rolling over Kennedy but dropping his buyout to $0. Kennedy, of course, didn’t go for it. He was fired the following spring. Does Carter go for something similar? I don’t envy his position.
The Matt Luke dilemma is his first real test. He did the right thing coming out strong in support of Luke at his introductory press conference, as well as a few days later on the Talk of Champions podcast, available in iTunes, SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts.
(Sorry. Always be selling.)
An A.D. is always supposed to show a united front. But whether or not Luke is at the reins for Ole Miss football in 2020 shouldn’t be a slam dunk. Far from it. Those in charge should have a real, substantive conversation.
Again, nothing personal, but results are all that matter. Carter said Luke checks every box but wins and losses. Problem there is all coaches are judged on is wins and losses.
And Luke is losing far more than he’s winning.
“Matt and I will sit down after the season and we’ll talk about next year (and) how we make the program better,” Carter said. “How do we get over the hump in some of these 50/50 games that we weren’t able to do this year. Those are things we’ll evaluate. I’m going to bet coach Luke’s going to be his hardest critic. He’s going to self-evaluate, he’s going to look at the program and look at who we’re recruiting and who we’re playing and do everything in his power to get us over that hump. We want to win.
“We know this is a win/loss business. We’ve got to get there. He expects that, we expect that and next year’s going to be a big year. But I’m very confident we’re going to go into next year with a lot of confidence and we’re going to go in there with another recruiting class stacked on top of this great freshman class that’s had a tremendous year and I see really positive things next year.”
Carter made these statements three days ago. Then Thanksgiving happened".
