Page 2 - 2018 Arkansas Football

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Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Sunday, August 26, 2018
Not by the numbers
Math teacher. Fireman. Actuary. Chad Morris had options, but coaching led him on an abnormal path to Arkansas.
TOM MURPHY ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
FAYETTEVILLE — The revival of the Arkansas Razorbacks’ football fortunes rests on the shoulders of a math-loving, play-designing whiz.
Chad Morris made his mark in the prep ranks in Texas and during a four-year run as offensive coordinator at budding pow- erhouse Clemson.
After the past three seasons of improv- ing the victory totals and really cranking up the offensive numbers as head coach at SMU, Morris landed the University of Ar- kansas job on Dec. 6. He gave an idea of his offensive mentality at the annual Arkansas football kickoff luncheon Aug. 17.
“We’re constantly trying to put pressure on defenses through playing fast pace with tempo,” Morris said. “I think the tempo and the pace of play causes problems. And just the ability to go through the run-pass options, the different structures, motioning in and out of structures.
“You’ll see us in two-back. You’ll see us in three-back. You’ll see us in five-wide. You’ll see us in 4 by 1, motioning back into the backfield. It’s just about the ability to change the structure and do it at a very fast pace.”
Morris turned his passion for football into a lifetime pursuit, and the Lone Star State native’s love for scheming offensive plans from an analytical, numbers-mad mind has delivered the energetic Morris levels of fame mixed with early misfor- tune.
Morris, 49, did not play organized foot- ball beyond high school — he was a math major at Texas A&M, Class of 1992 — but his love for the sport never waned, even when teaching math, working as an actuary or becoming a fireman looked like his plan.
As a teenage quarterback at Edgewood (Texas) High School, Morris’ self-confi- dence was on display.
“When he was a freshman, he came up to me and said, ‘Coach, just play me and you’ll never regret it,’ ” said Jimmie McEn- turff, the Edgewood head coach that season and a longtime Morris mentor. “Even as a rookie in high school, he was able to read the secondary and do things that a fresh- man is not supposed to be able to do.”
David Whiting took over as head coach
NWA Democrat-Gazette/ANDY SHUPE
First-year Arkansas Coach Chad Morris has enjoyed success coaching at the high school level in Texas and as an assistant at Clemson before eventually being a head coach at SMU and now Arkansas. But those around him saw his potential even before that. “I could see Chad being successful in whatever he did,” said Jack Shellnutt, who taught and coached Morris at Edgewood (Texas) High School. “He worked too hard not to. He worked in the classroom as hard as he did in athletics.”
the season after Morris earned solid play- ing time as a freshman.
“Just to be real honest, Chad was a very scrawny looking kid who wanted to play football,” Whiting said. “I went to the other coaches who ... I inherited on the staff, and they felt Chad would be a good one to go with, and I took their advice and it turned out to be good advice.”
Whiting said Morris had a special skill for studying defenses and “using his brain
to help outwit them to try to beat them physically and otherwise.
“He was always an innovator. He was always out after practice, he and some of the other guys, running their own plays.”
Experimentation outside of Whiting’s Power-I playbook came with risks and re- wards.
“Oh yeah, he got in trouble a couple of times for that,” recalled Jack Shellnutt, then a math teacher and assistant coach at Edge-
wood who helped ignite Morris’ pursuit of math and coaching. “I remember one time we were playing a team that beat us pretty soundly, and we didn’t have anything going offensively. He called an audible to a pass play, and it was the best play we had all night. He got in trouble for it, too.”
Morris recalled another play he and his buddy Chris Mattingly came up with on their own and decided to run for real.
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