One picture is worth a thousand words. I was generally supportive of Croom’s hire at the time, but—like The Orgeron—he failed to produce on the big stage. Or even, sometimes, on little ones.

So, we’re now two games into the Houston Nutt era at Ole Miss and the record stands… exactly the same (1–1) as it did after two games of the Ed Orgeron era.

The similarities, though, seem to end there: instead of barely edging Memphis and losing by eight to Vandy the Rebels thumped the Tigers (admittedly, at home, and admittedly a Tiger team that this weekend just got beat by Rice, of all teams) and came within an arguably bogus pass interference call of a road victory against what appears to be the best team in the ACC this year (admittedly, not saying much considering the sorry state of the contemporary ACC), with the team missing two of the team’s key defensive starters for most of both contests (Peria Jerry played limited time against Wake, while Greg Hardy remains out).

I don’t know that Jevan Snead is going to make anyone in Oxford forget Eli Manning (call me back when Snead goes 28–28 in his first 28 pass attempts in a game), but he’s already helped me wash away the memory of the likes of Micheal Spurlock and Ethan Flatt. And, for better or worse Nutt has brought back the high drama of Rebel offensive playcalling in a way not seen since the traitorous Riverboat Gambler was roaming the sidelines at Vaught-Hemingway.

Is this the year the Rebels get back to a bowl for the first time since the Second Coming of Manning? The schedule looks favorable, although I only see one likely road win for the Rebels at this point (at sputtering Arkansas). But with Jerry back and Hardy on the mend, the Rebels will be tough to beat at home and might even be able to steal a second win on the road to move up beyond the Poulan Weed-Eater bowl-of-last-resort level.

* Yes, I know the Poulan Weed-Eater Bowl no longer exists, but it’s fun to type and represents the sort of crappy bowl game, usually held in Shreveport, the Rebels regularly attend.

Who in their right mind in Texas would rather see Oregon State vs. Penn State instead of Ole Miss vs. Wake Forest? Then again, maybe they’re just trying to help the Longhorns cover up losing their team’s best quarterback to Ole Miss.

I had a few beers this evening at Buffalo Wild Wings with Frequent Commenter Alfie and Frequent Facebook Correspondent Annie while watching the Ole Miss-Vanderbilt baseball game and various other sporting events, including part of a UFC contest. The onion rings were very good, as was the company, and even the beer wasn’t that badly priced.

An email subject header this afternoon from my inbox:

REMINDER: 2008 Ole Miss Football Renewal Deadline

Alas, I’m not one of those rich alumni who can afford to jet in from Laredo to Oxford seven or eight times a year. Or even once for that matter.

Longtime Signifying Nothing staple Margaret Soltan samples a recent export from Oxford, Mississippi. I can’t say that the shirtless men were of particular interest to me during my six years on campus, but I suppose the general sentiment is well-taken.

Marvin King, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Mississippi, my graduate alma mater, has just launched a blog focusing on African-American politics and political science; as someone whose research and teaching interests in Southern politics overlap that area, it’s good to have another voice contributing to the blogosphere’s coverage of black politics from a scholarly perspective.

Win the Grey Cup (the equivalent to the Super Bowl north of the border) and weeks later you’re willingly taking a job as second-banana on what is unquestionably the worst football team in the Southeastern Conference. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that Kent Austin is coming to Oxford (and, on paper, the Rebels should be better than they were last year), and you couldn’t pay me enough to live anywhere in Saskatchewan, but damn.

Houston Nutt will be the next coach at Ole Miss. I figured there’d be a much longer process to fill the job; maybe I was projecting from my experiences onto others’. Now hopefully Nutt can get things back on the right track, we don’t lose many recruits and the kids who can go to the NFL stay, and we can go from there.

Orson Swindle on the aftermath of O-for-8’s firing:

This leaves the pesky question of who will take the Ole Miss job. Exquisitely timed as always, Ole Miss has fired a coach just in time to compete against Texas A&M, Michigan, Nebraska, and god knows what other larger, more monied programs will fire their coaches in the next ten minutes–not to mention the vacancies gaping after the guys who fill those positions leave their current positions.

Now I have to find a new tagline for the blog. Here’s a bittersweet final tell ‘em ‘bout it, Joe-Joe! for the road.

Rick Cleveland 1, Ed Orgeron 0. I guess Boone and Khayat think they can turn things around faster with someone else running the show; I’m not that convinced, but maybe they’ve got an ace up their sleeves.

To me, the quasi-obvious candidate is Mike DuBose, who’s quietly turned around the Millsaps football program in what many people have perceived as a stepping-stone job back to I-A. If Mike Price had seen more consistent success at UTEP, he might be on the board as well.

Since when do college football players issue press releases? More eye-popping:

Even after missing two games, Hardy still leads the Southeastern Conference in tackles for a loss per game and sacks.

That may say more about the general suckitude of SEC defenses this year than Greg Hardy’s talent, but following in the footsteps of a legend like Patrick Willis as a freshman is hardly a small feat either.

The SEC is pretty wacky this year to begin with, considering the consensus best team in the league, LSU, keeps squeaking by teams it has no apparent business beating based on the team’s on-field performance. (At least the paper tigers in other conferences which have flirted with the top of the rankings have been exposed, from Boston College to South Florida.) And I don’t even pretend to comprehend what’s going on in Lexington and (gasp) Starkville.

Ugh. On the upside, I did meet a couple at the bar I saw the game at that gave me some suggestions for tourist stuff to do when Mom is here next week, so all-in-all I guess it was worthwhile.

If I can’t get this ticket for the Ole Miss/Northwestern State game to sell for at least 42¢, I don’t know what I’ll do… I guess I’ll probably just mail it to Frequent Commenter Alfie or something.

Perhaps I’m just too practically-minded, but I’m not at all sure what good would come from firing Ed Orgeron as the Ole Miss coach after three seasons, two of them with David Cutcliffe’s players and hastily-grabbed JuCo guys. After getting oh-so-close to beating Florida and Alabama, and hanging in for three quarters against Georgia, I’m hardly surprised that the Rebels’ collection of first-year starters and walk-ons couldn’t hold it together against a Heisman candidate on a good team that was desperate for a win to save their coach’s job—a team that regularly beat the Rebels under Tubby and Cutcliffe too, mind you.

Now, if Dickie Scruggs has a suitcase full of cash that he’s willing to hand over to Bobby Petrino, and Petrino’s willing to take it to come in and spend the next 2–3 years at the bottom of the SEC, that’s one thing, but realistically I don’t see who’s out there who’s going to do a better job than Orgeron. If the issue is play-calling on Saturday, toss Werner and/or get a full-time defensive coordinator to make the calls. But replacing Orgeron with some other coach plucked from obscurity, or one of the “hot” coaches from a lower-tier conference like C-USA or the Big Least, who likely won’t even have Orgeron’s recruiting chops, is just a recipe for more of the same.

Rick Cleveland points out that the SEC apparently uses a different definition for “indisputable” than the rest of humanity—not that we should have expected the competence of SEC replay officials to exceed the legendary incompetence of its on-field officials in the first place.

Alfie, as one of my sole remaining commenters, requested that I post the following photo.

My other pictures from Saturday are here.

I found out last night that the faculty party I was planning to attend tonight was cancelled due to a family illness, so today I was left with the choice of whether to use my ticket to see Tulane play Houston or stay home tonight to listen to Ole Miss play Vanderbilt on XM. Then I found out the game is on pay-per-view… but apparently there’s no way for me to order it, since Cox’s sales office is closed after 5 on Saturday, the website only lets you sign up for a season subscription, Cox doesn’t give me access to ESPN360, and the stupid cable box Cox gave me doesn’t show it as a pay-per-view event.

So I’ll be listening on XM 232 instead, and Cox just blew its chance to sell me the game (or upsell me to the GamePlan season package).

You know, if someone had told me earlier in the week that Ben-Jarvus Green-Ellis would run for 226 yards and Seth Adams would pass for 305 today, I’d probably have been happy. But zero execution in the red zone and missed conversions = a loss to Missouri. I’d have consoled myself with a Mississippi State loss to Tulane, but no such luck, despite the game being tied at 17 at the half. What’s even worse is I was sitting next to a kid, so I couldn’t even shout profanities at the State fans or the referees.

So instead I consoled myself by seeing Superbad. That did the trick.

I am truly speechless.

þ: EDSBS.

Sunday’s Commercial Appeal has a lengthy article by Scott Cacciola profiling the latest iteration of the Great Cannon-Armed Hope to arrive in Oxford, ex-Texas QB Jevan Snead. Snead has at least one thing working in his favor: the cajones to mess with The Orgeron:

He felt comfortable enough with Ole Miss head coach Ed Orgeron and Werner to play a practical joke when he called them from Morris’ office to say he was committing.

“Thanks for the visit, you all were great, but I don’t think I got enough out of this weekend,” Snead recalled telling them before pausing—a big dramatic pause. “So I’m going to have to ask you to keep me around for four more years.”

Morris estimated that Orgeron and Werner whooped and hollered on the other end for close to 30 seconds. Yes, they were excited.

If nothing else, Snead’s recruitment probably puts the kibosh on the Cannon Smith era beginning anytime soon, if the latter’s felony drug arrest hadn’t already done so.

EDSBS links the bizarro-universe version of its site, Every Day Should Be Lemsday, written exclusively using Michael Lewis’ transcription technique for Orgeron-speak (a language related to, but not exactly, Louisiana Cajun). Never mind that “Lemsday” isn’t really a day of the week in Orgeron-speak—I believe it is a contraction of “let them stay.”

EDSBS posts the second part of their interview with Michael Lewis, author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, spouse of Tabitha Soren, and no relation to Kurt Loder.

From Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side, explaining the passions surrounding the Egg Bowl to outsiders:

The game served as a proxy for the hoary Mississippi class struggle, between the white folks who wore shirts with collars on them and the white folks who did not. Mississippi State was a land grant college, originally called Mississippi A&M. The desperate contempt Ole Miss football fans felt for Mississippi State was echoed in the feelings of fans of the University of Texas for Texas A&M and fans of the University of Oklahoma for Oklahoma State—formerly known as Oklahoma A&M. These schools were not rivals; they were subordinates. Theirs was not a football team to be beaten but an insurrection to be put down. This notion was most vivid in the Ole Miss imagination: that the state of Mississippi, with the sole exception of the town of Oxford, was once a Great Lake of Rednecks. In recent decades the earth had warmed, and the shores of Great Lake Redneck had receded, so that, strictly speaking, perhaps it should not be described as a lake. But still, the residue was a very large puddle. And the one place in the puddle deep enough to ruin a shiny new pair of tassel loafers was Starkville, Mississippi.

Orson Swindle at EDSBS has posted part one of a two-part interview with Moneyball author Michael Lewis, wherein he discusses his new book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game and the primary subject of that book, Ole Miss offensive tackle Michael Oher.

The following passage of the interview warmed the cockles of my heart—by way of explanation for the warming, the Ole Miss political science department used to house the criminal justice program until it was spun off along with the rest of the programs that a four-year university (much less the College of Liberal Arts) had no business operating into a separate school:

[ML:] On behalf of [Oher’s] mind, I would say…I’e watched him over the past few years, and he’s become a much more verbal person. He is intelligent–he’s not stupid. He’s shrewd, and he’s sensitive. The way he’s impressed me is not with his grades in the classroom, though I’m sure he’s worked to get them and they’re not entirely fraudulent.

OS: We’re not talking about Auburn, here.

ML: Well, I do think we’re talking about that. All these schools have the smooth track for the football players–

OS: Sociology at Auburn, Criminal Justice…

ML: It’s funny. You watch the Saturday football games, and if it’s West Virginia playing, all the football players are “sports management” majors, but if it’s Ole Miss playing, all the football players are “criminal justice” majors. So you get the sense that every school has its major for the football team, and it’s different from school to school. All the Ole Miss football players aren’t majoring in criminal justice because they have a deep and sincere interest in criminal justice. It’s that that’s where you go to get the grades.

And Michael is majoring in criminal justice. That’s not a great sign, but he’s doing well. And this is what is true about him: he’s not just “not dumb,” he’s intelligent and sensitive. When he sits down to write something, it’s actually impressive. He’s got things to say. The mind he’s got is a good and interesting mind. That that is true despite his first sixteen years on the planet is amazing.

Incidentally my copy of Blindside was allegedly going to be shipped to my mom’s house in Memphis by Amazon.com today for delivery Wednesday, according to the checkout screens, but given the current delivery estimate of next Monday I doubt that actually happened. Regardless I promise a review soon.

Update: Never mind; I just got an email from Amazon.com that has a tracking number saying it will be delivered tomorrow. So, depending on how engaging a read it is, I may have a review up by the end of this weekend.