We figured out your Ole Miss football head coaching names, and you’re all hired

Ole Miss’ head football coach Hugh Freeze is gone. Freeze probably belongs in the basements of southeastern sports programs everywhere, though should he fizzle up at, say, Auburn, then that’d be fun as all hell. He won’t. Don’t worry.

Anyway, Ole Miss football needs a new head coach. Ole Miss needs a new head coach that will guide sophomore Shea Patterson through a complicated schedule in 2017, but also stabilize a team that, well, lost its head coach just six weeks before the 2017 season began.

We’ve already entertained the idea of Matt Luke as Ole Miss’ permanent replacement, and that actually kinda works, depending wholly on how many games he wins in 2017.

ANYWAY, Matt Luke is pretty solidly an Ole Miss football coaching name, though it’s among the least colorful available to American humans, notwithstanding its occupation of two of the four titles of the Biblical Gospels.

Still, let’s take a moment to ask a question and seriously consider what sort of nomenclature Ole Miss’ next head football coach should hold. After all, they employed a man named Houston Nutt, whose appellation feels more at home in central Arkansas than north-central Mississippi.

So try this on for size:

SEC coaching names are a thing. Jimmy Curtis is, admittedly, among the least inspired possibilities out there. Certainly less so than some of his real-world counterparts. Les Miles. Nick Saban. Bret Bielema. Steve Spurrier. Gus Malzahn. Kirby Smart. Hugh Freeze. Alliteration, internal rhyme, Lucretian syllabilism — all this attends many of these men’s names, and perhaps condensed nachnamen can or will mask an air of embarrassment, as Butch Jones and Derek Dooley grow red in the corner.

Jim McElwain runs a Tires Plus in Ocala, Fla. and there’s nothing exciting about that.

But let’s back up and ask, earnestly, what is your Ole Miss football coaching name? We began with head coach possibilities, sure, but so many of you beautiful people submitted such startlingly pertinent names that we felt the need to construct an entire collegiate football coaching staff.

I mean, just look at this shit — it’s just so on the nose.

See, this is daring but at the same time old school as hell. Hank Rogers, our specifically fullbacks coach, will get listened to very little on autumn Saturdays, but he’ll sure as hell cause a ruckus on that there sideline.

Who needs a safeties coach? We got you, fam.

There’s something peculiarly deep-south about the two-initial monicker that just wouldn’t scan north of Harpers Ferry, even when the initials don’t mean a thing.

Nor in fact would this glorious submission.

PEE WEE CARMICHAEL. Why not name every SEC coach Pee Wee Carmichael and be done with it. Or, conversely, why shouldn’t every SEC coach be named something like this?

That’s easy enough. Or this, which is truly sublime?

Or this, which resides on the same register, if in a different cubicle?

Or this, a particularly wholesome and altogether believable possibility?

Or even this?

Babe Landry won three consecutive national titles at LSU in the 1940s. You can look that up on Sports Reference if you don’t believe me.

In any case, we’re still waiting on a RAMBO HAWKINGS or some such, but all of you who participated are RCR’s favorite people. You can monitor everyone’s submissions here, and argue relentlessly about who should hold which particular position within Ole Miss’ coaching tree. Thanks to all for keeping the dream alive.