Dabo Swinney coaching tree: Ranking every coach to come from Swinney’s management
By John Buhler
Chad Morris was not that good at SMU and was an absolute tire fire at Arkansas
It seems like a lifetime ago, but Chad Morris had a ton of promise as a college head coach after leaving Clemson. He wasn’t the first hotshot coordinator to work for Swinney, but he was the first to devolve into a tire fire of epic proportions. Though he had like one good year at SMU, it could not have gone worse for him during his two-year run dragging Arkansas to the bottom of an abyss.
In three years at SMU, Morris went 14-22 leading the Mustangs and 8-16 in conference play. He had SMU go 7-5 in his final season in Dallas, leaving before the bowl game to take over for Bret Bielema at Arkansas in 2018. During his two years in Fayetteville, Morris went 4-18 overall and 0-14 in SEC play. He didn’t win a single conference game at Arkansas… How is that even possible?!
When he got fired in 2019, Arkansas was arguably the worst program in the Power Five. Keep in mind that this isn’t Duke, Indiana or Kansas, historic basketball powers with little college football history to be proud of. Arkansas is a top-25 job with top-25 resources. Somehow, someway, he made this team worse than Vanderbilt on a regular basis in the same conference. It was horrific…
Unlike Scott, Morris will never be a major college head coach again after that Arkansas debacle.