I’ve decided that my blog is going to have a theme this week. And the theme is going to be: People who have WAY too much free time on their hands.
As a college student who is now returning to class after having been on break for almost the whole month of May, I know what it is like to have lots of time on my hands. Those of you who have been tracking with me this month have probably already discerned that I must have had lots of free time on my hands; I leave it to you to discern whether or not that is a good thing.
But apparently there are some people running around out there who have WAY more free time on their hands than is good for them by any stretch of the imagination.
Yesterday I looked at the Chuck Swindoll situation. It amazed me that somebody had enough time on their hands to actually monitor his program for seven years and track every instance of what they considered to be objectionable speech. Now there’s somebody with WAY too much time on their hands.
Today I will look at another situation, one that has been developing over in Arkansas over the last six months or so. Houston Nutt is the head football coach at Arkansas. He has done a very competent job as Arkansas’ head coach; he has utilized the resources at his disposal to produce teams that contend for the SEC championship on a fairly consistent basis. But some Arkansas fans aren’t exactly feeling the love. Some feel that his teams don’t win enough (although it’s very hard to argue that when you’ve won 10 games the previous season and have most of that team back for the upcoming season). Some question his use of the running game versus the passing game. And some question his committment to the Arkansas football program after his being linked with coaching vacancies at Nebraska in 2003 and LSU in 2004.
Well, somebody got the bright idea to request Houston Nutt’s cell phone records under Arkansas’ open records law, look through them and try to stir up something. Sure enough, he found something. An Arkansas booster who is a close friend of the Nutt family sent Mitch Mustain a couple of disparaging emails in December, which may have prompted him to transfer, and he wanted to see if Houston Nutt knew more about this email than he had let on in the media. I guess he thought that Houston Nutt should have been sticking up for Mustain and that he did not do a very satisfactory job of that.
But wait. It gets juicier. It turns out that Houston Nutt exchanged over a thousand text messages with a news anchor in Fort Smith on the day before and the day of Arkansas’ Capital One Bowl appearance. This led our friendly cell-phone-record-reviewer guy to suspect that Houston Nutt was having an affair with this news anchor. Our friend up in Arkansas also saw that Houston Nutt had placed calls to people at Miami and N. C. State while they were looking for new head coaches. Could Houston Nutt have been interested in pursuing either of those positions? Things that make you go “Hmmm…”
Seems to me like somebody up in Arkansas has WAY too much spare time on their hands.
Here is the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette summation of the story. You can read it for yourself and get the whole skinny. But be warned. It’s a long and complicated story.
And if you have lots of free time on your hands, here is a 48-page PDF document that somebody out there (who probably has way too much time on their hands) put together which details Houston Nutt’s contact with Mitch Mustain’s disparaging emailer, his contact with the anchorperson in Fort Smith, and his contact with Miami and N. C. State. This document also contains some other goodies, including a letter from Houston Nutt’s attorney to our friendly cell-phone-record-requester guy, as well as the email which may have provoked Mustain to transfer, which begins with the immortal line “Hello Mr. Interception King”. This is really juicy stuff and you need to read it. Scroll down to about the middle of page 40 and you will find it. But if you sit there and read all 48 pages of this thing, then you definitely have WAY too much time on your hands.
