Like it is : Chaotic only way to describe Hogs’ situation
Posted on Thursday, February 15, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/Sports/181953/
When the boss returned to work last week following an automobile wreck that sent him first to the hospital and then home for a few days, he wasted no time in setting the record straight.
The managing editor, who doesn’t like his name in the paper (mistake No. 2 ), chewed me out the best he could without inflaming his injured ribs.
“I never said we don’t report on things on the Internet or messages,” he said quite calmly, all things considered. “I said we don’t report on Internet gossip or malicious messages.”
Realizing I was wrong, I apologized.
Before that day ended, other documents started coming in about the infamous e-mail to Mitch Mustain and it started to take on a life of its own, but the real head-turner in this saga turned out to be an e-mail sent to me that had been mostly forgotten.
Look, hundreds of e-mails are received each week. Saying not all of them agree with me would be like saying you might eat some candy on Valentine’s Day.
All of them are read and usually answered.
When the one to me on Dec. 6 from Teresa Prewett was read, there was no immediate surprise or offense taken.
Understand, at one time she was a friend / buddy and I once testified that profanity is a regular part of her vocabulary, and, yes, that was in her defense.
So I read the e-mail, closed it and moved on.
I had already taken a verbal beating from her earlier in the football season, and the written one left no doubt I was no longer in her circle of friends.
Anyway, last week proof arrived that the e-mail sent to me had been forwarded by someone using a Nutt family e-mail account to at least two other people with the personal note: “I thought you might enjoy reading this. A person we know in Little Rock sent this to Wally Hall but the Gus and Springdale section are quite funny.”
Prewett expressed very strong negative feelings about Malzahn, Mustain and the other Springdale players in that e-mail.
That’s her, very opinionated.
That it was forwarded left a kind of uneasy feeling, though.
Houston Nutt admitted that unbeknownst to him his wife, Diana, had written the note and forwarded the e-mail.
Perhaps the name Gus Malzahn was much discussed in the Nutt household.
You have a person who admits to being close and loyal to the Nutt family making the comments and someone in the Nutt household who thinks they are funny passing them on.
That does not bode well.
For more than a year, the public was told everything is beautiful in its own way in the Razorbacks football program.
Now it appears that was not true, especially by the end of the season.
This whole thing is a sad state of affairs.
A head coach has play-calling duties taken away. He hires a local high school coach to call plays, recruits his star players, wins a bunch of games, and when the new offensive coordinator leaves suddenly and the quarterback with the best credentials in school history decides to join his teammate / receiver and leave the program, it looks like it is in chaos at best.
Malzahn’s hurry up no huddle had been scrapped before the end of the first game. It was his signature offense, and an offense Athletic Director Frank Broyles said wouldn’t work in college.
The situation apparently was much more sensitive all season than the average person realized.
It seems maybe no one is totally right or wrong in what has transpired — there’s plenty of blame to go around — but for those players to overcome this much dysfunction and win 10 games, one can only imagine what could have been accomplished if everyone were on the same page.
If you listened to the segment last Friday when Houston Nutt called The Buzz anywhere other than 1037 thebuzz. com, you probably got a version that was censored by an unknown hand.
More than a minute was cut out of the broadcast, mostly of me.