The difficulty with even starting to address that issue beyond the fact that Searels never should have been given the job is that Mack, certainly at this stage in life, seems to harbor a very strong preference to hire assistants that come from at least 1 of 4 groups: former assistants of his; former players of his; guys who have major ties to people in one of the first two groups; guys who can earn him some brownie points with academic administrators and/or journalists.
That leaves out a whole lot of potentially top level assistant coaches, while opening doors wide for quite a few has-beens and wannabes.
If I were forced to bet on which assistant Mack would make his scapegoat for this year's messes (if Bubba and boosters were to force him to can 1), I'd bet on Searels. It takes most average fans a long time to see poor fundamentals in a poorly coached OL, and that goes at least double until the bottom falls off completely. But when they do see it, it makes a major impact on many of them. And by now, most people who ignored me, and/or attacked me, when I asserted that Searels was a bad hire are discovering that they too always had a bad feeling about Searels.
If you saw last week's Arkansas at Ole Miss game (which was on ESPN right before the UNC debacle), you saw a pair of teams with HCs in their second seasons at those schools. And you saw 2 OLs that dominated the Ds they faced. The Arkansas OL looked especially good, opening huge holes for runs all day and giving a power-running QB who routinely floats wounded ducks or else fires off kilter rockets, all day to pass, on every pass play. It makes sense that great OL coach Sam Pittman would have rebuilt the Hawg OL ASAP. It is not good enough to slow down the best D in the country (UGA), but it makes the Searels mess look like a Juco line brought together over 1 month by an OL coach who assumes the largest guys in the student body must get those starting jobs.
The Arkansas OL certainly owes its great improvement over the past year and a half first and foremost to Pittman. But the OL coach, Cody Kennedy, is a young protege of Pittman. After starting a career in D2 football, Kennedy was a grad assistant to Pittman at UGA, which secured him the OL job at Tulane. After 2 seasons, he followed the Tulane OC to Southern Miss, and then Pittman pulled him up to the Big Time.
Kennedy might think he needs more time under Pittman, and Pittman might warn him against UNC, but he is the kind of young coach that Mack Brown should have been seeking diligently to find, rather than relying on an old compadre from his days of declining Texas.
Speaking of Pittman, it is worth wondering what would have happened to UNC football if Holden Thorp after going PC to fire Butch had resisted double PC and named Pittman as Interim HC rather than Withers (who could lose 4th quarter leads better than any DC I've ever seen).
The young Ole Miss OL coach is Jake Thornton. He is in his first season with the Rebels, and Kiffin plucked him right from under our noses: he was OL coach and run game coordinator at Gardner-Webb. His first job was at Western Carolina, his alma mater, and then he spent a year as a grad assistant at Bama. The OL under his charge is good enough to place Matt Corral at the top of the Heisman race, while the Searels OL is getting Howell pummeled completely out of any Heisman or 1st round draft talk.
That leaves out a whole lot of potentially top level assistant coaches, while opening doors wide for quite a few has-beens and wannabes.
If I were forced to bet on which assistant Mack would make his scapegoat for this year's messes (if Bubba and boosters were to force him to can 1), I'd bet on Searels. It takes most average fans a long time to see poor fundamentals in a poorly coached OL, and that goes at least double until the bottom falls off completely. But when they do see it, it makes a major impact on many of them. And by now, most people who ignored me, and/or attacked me, when I asserted that Searels was a bad hire are discovering that they too always had a bad feeling about Searels.
If you saw last week's Arkansas at Ole Miss game (which was on ESPN right before the UNC debacle), you saw a pair of teams with HCs in their second seasons at those schools. And you saw 2 OLs that dominated the Ds they faced. The Arkansas OL looked especially good, opening huge holes for runs all day and giving a power-running QB who routinely floats wounded ducks or else fires off kilter rockets, all day to pass, on every pass play. It makes sense that great OL coach Sam Pittman would have rebuilt the Hawg OL ASAP. It is not good enough to slow down the best D in the country (UGA), but it makes the Searels mess look like a Juco line brought together over 1 month by an OL coach who assumes the largest guys in the student body must get those starting jobs.
The Arkansas OL certainly owes its great improvement over the past year and a half first and foremost to Pittman. But the OL coach, Cody Kennedy, is a young protege of Pittman. After starting a career in D2 football, Kennedy was a grad assistant to Pittman at UGA, which secured him the OL job at Tulane. After 2 seasons, he followed the Tulane OC to Southern Miss, and then Pittman pulled him up to the Big Time.
Kennedy might think he needs more time under Pittman, and Pittman might warn him against UNC, but he is the kind of young coach that Mack Brown should have been seeking diligently to find, rather than relying on an old compadre from his days of declining Texas.
Speaking of Pittman, it is worth wondering what would have happened to UNC football if Holden Thorp after going PC to fire Butch had resisted double PC and named Pittman as Interim HC rather than Withers (who could lose 4th quarter leads better than any DC I've ever seen).
The young Ole Miss OL coach is Jake Thornton. He is in his first season with the Rebels, and Kiffin plucked him right from under our noses: he was OL coach and run game coordinator at Gardner-Webb. His first job was at Western Carolina, his alma mater, and then he spent a year as a grad assistant at Bama. The OL under his charge is good enough to place Matt Corral at the top of the Heisman race, while the Searels OL is getting Howell pummeled completely out of any Heisman or 1st round draft talk.
