Since we are playing Ole Miss, thought this might be a good place to post this piece of information. Does some of the following sound vaguely familiar?
A spokesman for a group of disgruntled Ole Miss supporters that placed an ad this morning in several daily Mid-South newspapers calling for a change in the school’s administration said the timing of the ad was “coincidental” following the Rebels’ 30-7 football loss at Vanderbilt on Saturday.
Lee Habeeb, speaking on behalf of Forward Rebels!, said the group had considered for more than a year starting an ad campaign to express its displeasure. The ad appeared in today's Commercial Appeal on page C6.
“This is not about one game,” said Habeeb, who lives in Oxford. “Three weeks ago, we decided to place this ad, and it’s the start of a series of ads.”
Today’s ad was headlined “Are you tired of losing, Ole Miss fans?”
The ad states that Forward Rebels! believes the school can compete in the SEC and win championships.
“We believe that our coaches are not the problem,” the ads reads. “Or our athletes. Or our fans. The Ole Miss administration is the problem.
“Our leadership has failed us. And our leadership must be held accountable. Our coaches and athletes deserve it. Ole Miss supporters deserve it.
“We’ve waited long enough. We’re tired of losing.”
Ole Miss athletic director Pete Boone is scheduled to speak at a 1:30 p.m. press conference today, just before football coach Houston Nutt’s weekly Monday meeting with the media.
Habeeb, 50, is a University of Virginia law school graduate who’s considered one of the top conservative radio talk producers in the nation. Because his wife is from Mississippi, he moved to Oxford three years ago, where he has a studio and produces five national talk shows.
He said after continually hearing unhappy Ole Miss supporters express their displeasure with school’s administration, particularly athletics, he agreed to help organize a campaign.
“We have a simple idea – real leadership accepts responsibility and then there’s change,” Habeeb said. “Coaches have come and gone, athletes have come and gone, but the administration has stayed the same. This is not right.
“I heard all these fans unhappy with the leadership and I asked them what they are doing about it. They said, `We approached the leadership and they ignored us.’.
“It came to a point where we thought, `This isn’t (the administration’s) university. This is the people’s university.’ It’s a simple notion of what’s going around the country right now – accountability and transparency. Get out of the way if you’re not fixing this thing.”
The Rebels, the only Western Division school that has never played in the Southeastern Conference championship football game, has had three head coaches in the last eight years.
Boone fired David Cutcliffe at the end of the 2004 season when Cutcliffe, 44-29 in six seasons including a co-West championship in 2003, went 4-7 and refused to make coaching staff changes.
Ed Orgeron, who had never been even a college coordinator, was hired off USC’s staff to replace Cutcliffe. Orgeron was 10-25 overall and won just three SEC games in three seasons before he was fired.
Nutt came to Ole Miss in 2008, forced out after 10 seasons at Arkansas where he won 61 percent of his games and twice took his team to the SEC championship game where it lost to Georgia in 2002 and eventual national champion Florida in 2006.
He guided Ole Miss to identical 9-4 records and Cotton Bowl wins in each of his first two seasons. But in the Rebels’ 15 games the last two seasons to date, he’s 5-10 overall and 1-8 in the SEC.
This past season, Boone approved new hires for Nutt’s coaching staff that increased salaries by $450,000, one of the newcomers being offensive coordinator David Lee.
So far this season in Ole Miss’ 1-2 start, the Rebels’ offense has scored but one touchdown in games (both losses) against fellow BCS schools Brigham Young and Vanderbilt.
After Saturday’s game, in which Vanderbilt recorded its most rushing yards in a SEC game in 17 seasons, a dejected Nutt was asked if it would be hard for an Ole Miss fan not to think negatively based on the Rebels’ confounding, disorganized performance.
“It is hard, I understand that,” Nutt said.
Habeeb, who said he’s not associated with Ole Miss in any way, even as fan, expects the Forward Rebels! campaign to gather steam.
“I think you’ll see hundreds of thousands of people on our Facebook page (accessed through the ForwardRebels.org) Web site by the end of the year,” Habeeb said. “They believe Ole Miss deserves better.”
