[QUOTE= He took Croom`s recruits and an advantageous schedule,


Please stop saying this. Every coach in America who had been on the job for 5 years or less is playing with someone else's recruits to some extent. Croom was awful. He was a bad coach, and a worse recruiter. And his players were always in trouble, even though he was all about high character. It was a complete debacle, a PR stunt. We set out to make a "historic hire", not the best football hire. And still, if that was our number 1 goal, there were a dozen better and more qualified coaches to choose from. That was a disaster. I digress. Croom had 1 good class, due to riding Ellis Johnson's defense to his line bowl appearance combined with the luck of MS having a historic senior class in 2009. And Dan had to fight like hell to keep that class together and added key pieces to it (if it's so easy to recruit in year 1, go back and look at Crooms first class). Now I'm all in for replacing Mullen, but give credit where it's due. He did some great things and has built a nice roster with good depth. He's just peaked as a coach. I want to move on so we can continue to build on what he's done instead of waiting for the imminent collapse and then starting from scratch in 2-3 years. We have to keep building. We have stalled. If we are afraid to admit the obvious and refuse to build on our new foundation, then we are doomed to continually repeat our crappy history forever.