ED: Jetlagged and uncaffienated is no way to live. Give us a moment here.
This is always an incredibly exciting time to be a college football fan. As I was trying to describe it to a less-than-interested friend of mine last night, "all of the hearsay we entertain ourselves right now is fun to us along the lines of the fun my mother would have watching E! to hear the juicy details about which overpaid actors and actresses are getting divorced." It's gossip. It's speculative and dramatic gossip with only the element of football, which is faint at this point, to make it less of a squirrelly, sissy endeavor.
But, it's when you're sitting at the end of a disappointing season, not seeing much if any light at the end of the tunnel, and asking yourself "well, now what," that this annual coaching scramble morphs from some sort of spectator sport and into a necessary exercise of football survival. Five BCS level positions remain open as of right now: Colorado, Minnesota, Miami, Vanderbilt, and Indiana. Once the Minnesota Vikings and Dallas Cowboys vacancies are tossed in, the rumors run wild.
Jon Gruden to Miami, Houston Nutt to Dallas, Randy Shannon to Ole Miss, Gus Malzhan to Vanderbilt, Tyrone Nix to Huddle House, Bobby Petrino to Minnesota; these are just a handful of the dozens upon dozens of rumors I've seen on various message boards and Twitter feeds. Are any of them true? I don't know, which, really, is a more diplomatic way of saying "no." I'd like to believe half of 'em, just for the pure entertainment value of it all, but it's all just guesswork at this point.
Things will change because, at this point of the year, they always do. Some folks are hiring while others are shopping their resumes around but, until the dust settles, none of us have any idea how that will end up (hint: it's never as exciting and dramatic as we want it to be).
As one would expect after the first home loss to Mississippi State since 1998, there is a lot of speculative talk in and around Oxford regarding the future of Coach Nutt and his staff. While I won't immediately comment on my assessment of such potential situations' respective viabilities (EXCEPT FOR TYRONE NIX NOT BEING IN OXFORD ANYMORE THAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN LIKE NOW), I will say that things certainly won't stay the same. They cannot and, if everything I'm reading is correct, the coaches and administrators themselves have hinted at the probability of significant changes. Now, whether or not that means that, on the one extreme, Nutt actually leaves for Colorado or Dallas (if we could only be so lucky) or, on the other extreme, Dave Rader goes back to selling insurance, none of us have any semblance of an idea. We'll speculate and guess alongside you, but know that we're not posting anything, if there's anything that will need posting, until it's official.
Until then, this is all just entertainment.