Jim Harris: Critical Saturday Ahead for Ole Miss' Nutt, Arkansas State's Roberts

Two coaches with Arkansas connections, Houston Nutt and Steve Roberts, face major, and possibly career-changing, games on Saturday.

Both Arkansas and Ole Miss could use a win to jump-start runs to a nice bowl trip for the holiday season. But it's safe to say that Houston Nutt, in his second year as the Rebels head coach, needs Saturday's win more than his successor at Fayettevile, Bobby Petrino.

Nutt's Rebels have already lost in a fashion that left the Ole Miss fan base highly disappointed. An offense that was supposed to click the way it did during the last half of the 2008 season was impotent, the passing game sporadic if non-existent, in setbacks at South Carolina (16-10) and at home to Alabama (22-3). If not for the Rebels' strong defensive front seven, probably the best collection of run stoppers and pass rushers Nutt has had as a head coach, the Alabama game would have turned embarassing and the South Carolina game would not have come down to a final, failed series in Gamecocks territory on a nationally televised Thursday night game.

Alabama needed five field goals because it could only penetrate the goal line once. South Carolina built a 16-3 lead before Nutt and the Ole Miss offense remembered it had the fastest player on the field in all-purpose back Dexter McCluster. Then they forgot him again on the final series of the game.

Already, much of the good will and excitement built up by Nutt in his first season at Ole Miss is dissipating. One Rebel fan reported that last week's crowd for homecoming against Alabama-Birmingham looked closer to those turnouts even before Vaught-Hemingway Stadium was renovated and enlarged to 60,000 seats -- a crowd in the 30,000 neighborhood was on hand, though it was announced to be in the high 40,000s.

Having Nutt's former team come to Oxford should bring out the big crowd again, or at least sway them from spending all day in The Grove tailgating. With LSU and Tennessee still ahead for Oxford and road trips to Auburn and Mississippi State, Ole Miss could finish anywhere from the two SEC losses it already has to four or more. Many national forecasters (and ArkansasSports360.com) pegged Ole Miss as the favorite in the SEC West and likely to earn the school's FIRST trip to the SEC Championship Game.

That goal may already be gone, the way Alabama is playing. But the last thing Nutt needs is a third loss in the league, especially to the school that ran him off. Also, it's probably the last time for a while that the Rebels will have an edge in talent and experience over the Razorbacks; Ole Miss will have 25 30 seniors (24 on the two-deep depth chart) on Saturday who won't be around when it visits Fayetteville next season.