I saw lots of that sentiment expressed at the game in Oxford this season. Bruce Feldman notes that it’s still a recruiting issue for Ole Miss.
… There’s also a delicate racial history that in some cases, makes it very tough to recruit players to Ole Miss. I know from talking to assistants who have coached at Ole Miss they’ve run into several situations where the kid’s parents or some grandparent or relative won’t allow them to go to Ole Miss because of the perception they have of it, which is something the football staff has to work hard to combat.
Keep in mind Feldman spent a year around that program when Orgeron was the head coach. He’s not shooting from the hip here.
No, that doesn’t excuse the Nuttster’s lazy recruiting efforts. But it does explain why Coach O was the only head coach to really excel in that department there.
Good luck to the next guy.
Get The Picture 
You know what could help that? If they hired Turner Gill. I know he got canned from Kansas but they really didn’t give him much of a shot and I still think he is a good coach.
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Rusdawg, are you part of the GA Illuminatti? If so, see if you can get Gill placed at South Carolina. We already have Ole Miss handled.
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Still wondering why no one has asked UNLV to change their mascot.
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Their Rebel runs and lives in Nevada.
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utter politically correct poppycock says I. The problem with recruiting for Old Miss is that it is Old Miss. Its a D-1 program in a State with 3 D-1 programs and a population of less than 3 million people. They get raided of their real talent (LUS and Bama) and the kids that are in Mississippi are not exactly college material. The school has no winning tradition in these kids or theirs parents lifetimes. It ain’t the mascot that’s giving them problems. Pogo was right ,”We have met the enemy and he is us” Do we believe that if the school had listened to the students and made Admiral Akbar their mascot they wouldn’t still be sucking ?. Old Miss sucks because they’re Old Miss.Use Mr Occam’s razor,it works.
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If kids’ parents are being cited as sources from whom these recruiting stories arise then the situation isn’t some political correctness boondoggle. I know it’s fun to start saying “PC Police!” the second something comes along that doesn’t seem offensive to you in particular, but to just dismiss this as a political tactic is just silly; and as a college head coach, you overlook things like this at your own peril. Ole Miss let this go on longer than they should have and now they’re paying for it. Sure, Ole Miss sucks because it is Ole Miss, but Ole Miss is Ole Miss because it, in part and until recently, had a mascot with very thinly veiled racist overtones.
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I guess having the battle flag on the at Columbia SC has crippled USC and Clem’s son efforts to field a winning team and sign the top in-state players while raiding other states. Its poppycock to put it nicely. Don’r become a race-baiter i.e. “thinly-veiled racial overtones.”
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I agree with Comin’DTTs. “Mississippi Burning” and other films are in the minds of many. The KKK is still actively fought in that state as their last bastion of populace following. Proscecutions and lawsuits have diminished their power in the South, but principally in Miss.
If you can’t be sensitive to black families’s persecution there and elsewhere in this day and age, you are yanking your own below-the-belt chain. This is not PC, but reality from a state where Southern authors Faulkner and Lee (although born in Al, the setting of “To Kill A Mockingbird” is in Miss) are pilloried as a sport. If you think those issues don’t ring true this day and age then your head is buried under a tombstone marked “Denial”.
If you don’t think black-skinned athletes, their families and friends along with anyone with African- American blood in their veins aren’t sensitive to these and other issues, then your head is buried somewhere else. The Confederate Flag came off the State of Georgia’s Flag some years ago due to the painful reminder of slavery to most citizens. Continuing to fly it in Miss plus imbraceing the iconic symbols of that past era on their state campus doesn’t put the Ole’ Miss welcome mat out for many good athletes.
Unfortunate that you would view it as “PC” when it has become Law borne from morality.
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Feldman’s book about recruiting, “Meat Market”, is great. It really opens your eyes to the real world of recruiting outside of what the fans read on subscription websites. I received it as a christmas gift one year and I finished it in less than three days. Oregeron’s success came from drinking a four pack of red bull twice of day. He never slept.
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It is a great book.
One other thing about Orgeron – he wasn’t a good head coach by any means, but he’s always been a helluva talent evaluator.
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100% correct on Coach O as an recruiter and evaluator of talent. There’s a reason why Kiffykins opened the bank again to hire him. He has almost no qualities of a successful head coach.
In regards to Ole Miss, they had the right guy with Cutcliffe. The arrogance of the movers and shakers, combined with a Chancellor who wouldn’t know a good coach if you handed him Bear Bryant got them in this mess. Cut can coach, has respect among peers and could evaluate talent well enough to keep Ole Miss as a mid-tier team and if the cards fell right, win 9 or 10. The firing of Cutcliffe and the subsequent bone-headed decisions by Khayat, et al have brought them into the abyss. It’ll be a monumental climb for that program to reach mediocraty.
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In other words, they did it to themselves. They’ll get no sympathy from me. I hope they stay at the bottom of the SEC for years to come. I’ll bet Cutcliffe is chuckling every time he sees an Ole Miss score on TV.
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They went from a supposedly racist mascot to one with the word “black” in it.
Ole Miss suffers from rectal-cranial inversion syndrome.
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