This is why I think they're stuck.
It's sorta like the movie "We Are Marshall," without all the sad feelings for all the dead players. The program is going to get hit with a bomb. No established coach is going to go clean it up, which leaves you with an up and coming coach. Indeed, this is the kind of job that screams ONLY for someone who:
a) cannot get a job elsewhere (which is hardly conducive to rebuilding Ole Miss)
b) is a diamond in the rough and can turn things around - a guy below the big name's radar.......and yet there's literally no way to know who that will be.
Go back and look at Nick Saban pre-LSU and BE HONEST - do any of you look at his record at Michigan St and say, "There's a guy who can turn it all around?"
No, you don't. Saban was a middling .500 football coach entering 1999, a guy with an 0-3 bowl record and an overall record of 25-23-1, who had never finished better than 5th in an 11-team league and was assumed to be a .500 coach since they play Ohio State either of his first two seasons.
He had ONE good year at Michigan State, and even that year had not only had a bunch of narrow wins but two blowout losses. Three plays the other way and Michigan State is 6-5 again.
But Saban has the name of a former head coach and LSU rolled the dice. Even his first season he had an insanely embarrassing loss to UAB. After 19 games at LSU, he was 12-7 and five of those losses weren't even really close.
Then he turned it around.
That's the thing here - Ole Miss literally has to find something close to next Nick Saban buried in the rough out there somewhere, a guy nobody else will give a chance.
I think Dooley is only a candidate because his father was an SEC legend. I think if his last name was Smith that it would not be on this list at all. Plus, Ole Miss has this obsession with former SEC personnel (Sloan/Brewer/Cutcliffe/Nutt/Freeze - only Tubs and Orgeron were different, and nobody thought Orgeron was on the radar nationally anyway).