Ole Miss hasn't forgotten about Orgeron

OXFORD, Miss. - This past summer when Ole Miss football coach Houston Nutt was in Atlanta filming the movie "The Blind Side," the story of former Rebels' offensive tackle Michael Oher, he found himself on the set locked in a room with fellow coaches-turned-actors.

In the transient world of SEC job security, all the coaches were portraying themselves in previous jobs.

There was Alabama's Nick Saban as LSU's coach; ESPN analyst Lou Holtz in his last coaching job at South Carolina; Nutt in his prior role as Arkansas coach; and the unemployed Phillip Fulmer and Tommy Tuberville in their previous jobs at Tennessee and Auburn.

Finally, there was Ed Orgeron, Tennessee's defensive line coach and former Ole Miss head coach.

The coaches made small talk. Then Nutt broke the ice with Orgeron, the guy he replaced, and who will be on the Vols' sideline Saturday against the Rebels.

"We talked a little bit about different players," Nutt said. "He commended me on the job that our staff did and I commended him on bringing in those defensive linemen. It went a little bit like that."

Nutt took the high road on the rest of the collateral damage he discovered when he got to Oxford.

"I was impressed with the defensive linemen," Nutt said, "but at the same time, I was told that I didn't have any secondary players, linebackers and this and that. We were also going to lose two or three scholarships based on APR (Academic Progress Rates).

"You heard a lot of things when there were four previous losing seasons (three by Orgeron, one by David Cutcliffe)," Nutt said. "There was a lot of doubt and a lot of individuals. There were . . . a lot of guys that had the wrong attitude. But everyone was hungry and wanted to win."

From 2005 to 2007, Orgeron was overwhelmed in all facets of being a head coach except recruiting. He was 10-25 and 3-21 in the SEC - one of the 10 worst league records in the last six decades for a coach in his first three years at a school.

Many of the veteran Rebels who signed with Orgeron felt he was a master recruiter.

Ole Miss junior defensive end Kentrell Lockett of Hahnville, La., said when he was being recruited, he had all but made up his mind to sign with Alabama. Then Orgeron got in Lockett's living room, his phone and in his head enough sway him to Oxford.

"He had a way with words," Lockett said. "Like when he visited me at my house, he said, 'Kentrell, just imagine next year at this time, you're going to be a freshman All-American. You're going to end the season with 18 sacks, you're going to lead the nation. Sacks cause fumbles. Do you know how it feels to be on an SEC playing field when a sack causes a fumble and the crowd goes wild?'

"I was getting chills and goosebumps. I'm like, 'I have to play for this guy.' He got me hyped up to where I had to be an Ole Miss Rebel.

"He'd call me every Monday, put me on a speaker phone and his whole staff would be on there. They'd be, 'Big 40, Kentrell, what's going on in Hahnville?' "

Rebels' senior receiver/running back Dexter McCluster said he and his teammates got their first taste of Orgeron's off-the-wall motivation when Orgeron tore his shirt off during a team meeting, and demanded the players do the same.

"He rips off his shirt and I was one of guys looking around wondering if he (Orgeron) was serious and should I do it," McCluster said. "We all did it and it was pretty fun. He was fired up. I thought it was a one-time thing, but he had that energy all the time."

But the dark side of Orgeron was that he also verbally abused his players too much. And the more the Rebels lost, the more he ordered physically demanding practices, not a good idea as a season progresses.

"A lot of guys want to show him that we really could play ball," Ole Miss senior receiver Shay Hodge said, "because a lot of them think he didn't think we were good.

"He never said anything bad to me, so I don't have anything bad to say about him. But I know some other guys, the way I saw him treat them, they'll have fire in their hearts about him."

Orgeron declined interview requests, leaving his boss, first-year Tennessee coach Lane Kiffin, to defend his honor.

"Like all of us, he'd change things, especially being his first head job, in the ways he did some things, or some of the people he hired around him," Kiffin said. "And he didn't get a whole lot of time. You need more time than that to get your recruits in and change the way a program is going."