Quote Originally Posted by Todd4State View Post
Huge difference between Dan and Jackie is Jackie pulled some huge upsets and I would say has the most “memorable” wins of any MSU coach. He also has some of the most embarrassing losses as well- but the huge wins outweigh those by a good bit.

Dan is in year eight. In year eight Jackie won the SEC West, he had beaten Florida on National TV, Peyton Manning, Texas twice, Alabama in 1996, 97, and 98, a good Auburn team on the road in 1997, a good Arkansas team to clinch the West, and was 5-3 against Mississippi as he would say including the Egg Bowl in Oxford to win the SEC West. Of course, Jackie’s best season was the next year as well. Dan doesn’t have the benefit of “we’ve never won like this before” as well so I would say that the standards for Dan are higher than they were for Jackie. Meaning having your best friend and albatross of an o-line coach on the staff no matter what isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Granted Dan only has seven years of work at this point in time, but to compare he is 4-3 against Ole Miss so that’s similar even though he is 1-3 the last four years, and his biggest wins are Florida 2010, Michigan 2010, LSU 2014, Texas A&M 2014, and Auburn 2014, and maybe Arkansas 2015 on the road and of course he doesn’t have any bad losses. So Dan is close, but not quite there yet. And again that is with essentially one less year.

But as far as Ole Miss and their cheating and us I have always said that we should wait and see what happens to them. If they get hammered, we need to keep doing what we are doing and improve our recruiting efforts legally to overtake them once and for all. That’s mainly tweaking some things like firing Hevesy and Sallach for the most part. Not a major overhaul. If Ole Miss gets away with cheating we should proceed accordingly and start cheating like them ourselves. However, if that were to happen EVERY SEC team would do the same. And probably power five team as well. It would just be insane and the NCAA would completely lose all control at that point. Which is why I think Ole Miss gets hammered. But it would be totally irresponsible for us to go ahead and cheat our asses off like Ole Miss before their sanctions get handed down because if we did that I guarantee you that we would get hammered ourselves.

And as I said before, we need to get ready because once reality sets in at Ole Miss they are going to get upset and blame us and come after us like they did in the 1990’s even though we have nothing to do with their current investigation. Our leadership just needs to be prepared to stand up to Ole Miss this time.
Yes, Jackie had some memorable wins and had opportunities for more, but "Bad Losses" does not accurately depict the entirety of the Jackie era. We had TERRIBLE seasons under Jackie that people seem to ignore because he took us to Atlanta. I sat through 3-6-2 ('93), 3-8 ('95), and 5-6 ('96). It put Jackie on the hot seat - and if it wasn't for that miracle against Bama in '96 we would have seen a new coach. But, we stuck with Jackie because we were looking at the long game. While Dan has had some disappointing seasons, I have never seen anywhere near the crap I saw those 3 seasons in the mid-90's.