Houston Nutt Already Starting with the Excuses at Ole Miss

The SEC media days interviews have just finished up. Ole Miss coach Houston Nutt said one of his patented "doosies" while being interviewed there.

While I don't have the exact quote, I can paraphrase what he said. He basically said something to the effect of "you don't win simply by changing drivers."

In other words, it's not my fault if Ole Miss keeps on losing.  Somehow, I'm betting that the Ole Miss faithful had a few expectations that Nutt was going to take a hands-on approach and be involved in the outcome of the season...win or lose.

This is unfortunate but predictable.  He did the same thing at Arkansas for 10 years.  Whenever it went right, it was Houston Nutt's idea.  Whenever it went wrong, he blamed his assistants or the players.  It was chronic.

This is one of the primary things that fans hated about Nutt and became ammunition for the crowd that wanted him gone.

Now he's setting up to blame external entities again.

"Don't blame me," he says. "I'm just the driver of this broken bus."

He should take a lesson from Steve Spurrier.  Spurrier has been called everything from Darth Visor to Steve Superior.  People love to hate him, and they loved it even more when he was beating them pretty regularly at Florida.  But when you contrast his comments against Nutt's, it sure makes Spurrier seem classy and Nutt seem classless.

Spurrier said, in a nutshell, that if things go wrong at South Carolina, it's his fault, but if things go right, it's his players and coaches that did it.  Spurrier has nothing left to prove. 

While he has enough money that he never needs to work again, his job would have to be in more jeopardy than Nutt's (given that Nutt is in his very first year with a program that can only go up).

Yet, Spurrier is not concerned at all about whether the fans will blame him or not so he's not getting silly comments like these out there in a vain attempt to blunt expectations. 

In fact, last year he went on record and said Carolina was ready to challenge for the SEC East.  He was wrong, but again he was not setting the table in advance so that it wouldn't bounce back on him.

Believe me, if Ole Miss succeeds, Nutt will say that he just knew Ole Miss could do it and that he was glad he could bring the success back to Ole Miss football. 

But if Ole Miss keeps losing, he'll somehow claim that it's not the driver that let everyone down.  It must have been the mechanic.