Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

We’ve all heard that Gus Malzahn is in it for the long haul in Jonesboro. He’s said it himself. He’s not a one-and-done for the Arkansas State Red Wolves, but instead he intends to build the Red Wolves into a program that can compete for a Top 25 ranking annually.

We’re glad he says it, and we hope he really means it.

Stay in your home state a while, Gus, and take Arkansas State football to the next level. Hang around to see that nice athletic complex come to fruition at Liberty Bank Stadium and to see home crowds double and maybe triple in size. And please make Little Rock an annual stop with even bigger and better opponents (no offense, UAPB, you are leading the SWAC West after all, but you’re not a BCS school) to play in War Memorial Stadium.

The problem is, Gus, if you keep hanging half-a-hundred on the hot-name coaches in the Sun Belt Conference on their home fields week after week, you’re going to have a decision to make. And while money may not always matter, this much money at these kinds of programs will matter.

Just as Tennessee Coach Derek Dooley on Wednesday rebuffed the rumor that he’d be resigning his multimillon-dollar job with the comment, “I’d be a dumb a** to do that,” it would be nonsensical if you passed up a $3-4 million a year payday from a BCS school to stay in Jonesboro for $850,000 a year.

But, here’s the deal, Gus: Keep trotting out your improving Red Wolves onto opposing fields and winning the turnover battle and looking more fundamentally sound and trouncing your foes like you’re all of a sudden Oregon, and you might have to break some Arkansas folks' hearts and leave again.

We’re all for you bettering your job situation, just as we were when you moved from Springdale High to Arkansas, and then when you got away from the Houston Nutt-run zoo (which, coincidentally, went backward when you left), and we were even fine about you going to Auburn from Tulsa. Yes, we both know a lot of the state was divided on that, being as Auburn's a Hogs division rival, but what other alternatives did you have to showcase your offensive acumen on the biggest defensive stage in college football?

And, how about that: Gene Chizik looks a lot like a worse version of Houston Nutt now that he doesn’t have you piling up 400-plus yards of offense, not to mention the eight or more victories a year.

You took a half-million dollar pay cut and you’re better off for it. Again.

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Mario Cristobal must have the best agent with the best press office around. All we heard for weeks in the summer and early this season was how Cristobal was on everybody’s coaching search list, and more than a few pegged him to be the next in line at Arkansas.

Of course, all these columns about Arkansas’ “leading contender” to replace Bobby Petrino are guesswork. Sometimes the lists halfway make sense. Sometimes the names defy logic (Jon Gruden, anyone?).