With his wife at his side, Houston Nutt sat face to face Thursday afternoon with the fan who requested the head football coach’s university cell phone records.

But nearly an hour of talking changed neither man’s mind, an attorney in the meeting said.

“It was a candid exchange,” said Nate Coulter, attorney for Thomas McAfee, 28, who discovered more than 1, 000 text messages between Nutt and a Fort Smith woman. “People on one side of the table had strongly held views and people on the other side of the table had equally strong views.”

Coulter added: “There was no yelling.”

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The meeting follows months of contention in both the University of Arkansas football program and the Razorback fan base that began after a Nutt family friend wrote two disparaging e-mails about former Hogs quarterback Mitch Mustain. Questions about whether Nutt knew of the e-mails before they were sent prompted McAfee to request, under the state Freedom of Information Act, the coach’s cell phone records.

As he walked out of the building briefly holding Diana Nutt’s hand, Houston Nutt refused repeatedly to answer questions about what he said in the meeting Thursday afternoon.

“I can’t do it,” Nutt said, smiling. “I’ve got to do what I’m told.”

Asked why he told his client not to talk, Nutt’s attorney, Byron Freeland, said, “I don’t think it’s appropriate at this time.”

Through Coulter, McAfee also declined to comment.

In letters to McAfee, Freeland has said the Searcy man may have defamed Nutt, and may have illegally interfered with Nutt’s contract with the UA. In the letters, Freeland also asked for a meeting between McAfee and Nutt so that the coach could set the record straight.

After requesting the cell phone records, McAfee sent emails to the UA trustees, Chancellor John White and UA System President Alan Sugg citing both Houston Nutt’s contact with Teresa Prewett around the time of her e-mails as well as the many exchanges between the coach and Donna Bragg, a television anchor in Northwest Arkansas. “I found some disturbing things regarding these phone records,” McAfee wrote. Coulter has said McAfee was motivated to go to the trustees because he believed what he saw in the phone records warranted investigation. Though Coulter believes there is no basis for legal action, he said Thursday evening that he didn’t get the feeling in the meeting that Nutt had ruled out the possibility. “I told them it was up to them [the Nutt family ] as to what happens next,” the Little Rock-based attorney explained.

A Montgomery County man has sued top university officials, saying they didn’t do enough to investigate Prewett’s e-mails. On Thursday afternoon, the university filed a request for more time to respond to the lawsuit, which school officials call frivolous.

Part of the meeting was about why McAfee sent e-mails to the trustees. Though Bragg was discussed, she was not the focus of the meeting.

Diana Nutt did speak to McAfee during the meeting, Coulter said, but declined to say specifically what she said to his client.

“She ought to speak for herself,” Coulter said.

Diana Nutt did not speak as she left the building with her husband. Both she and her husband have said there was no inappropriate relationship with Bragg, who Houston Nutt said he knows through their mutual work for a charity organization.

In a letter to fans in April, Houston Nutt wrote that rumors about him and Bragg are “unfounded and false.” Bragg has said the same.

Also during the meeting, the two men spoke about the e-mails sent by Prewett. The Little Rock booster sent the emails harshy criticizing Mustain on Dec. 6 and 7.

Prewett sent the Dec. 6 email, which contained disparaging passages not only about Mustain but also about former offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn, to Diana Nutt’s e-mail account, among others. The coach’s wife forwarded it to a Springdale business, remarking that some of the bits were “quite funny.”

The next day, Prewett followed up with the now infamous e-mail that began, “Hello, Mr. Interception King,” and ripped into Mustain.

Houston Nutt has repeatedly said that he had no prior knowledge of the e-mails. He reprimanded Prewett for sending them.

McAfee thought news stories about the e-mails, as well as subsequent interviews Nutt gave other media outlets, left many unanswered questions.

To McAfee, phone records showing whether the Nutts had talked to Prewett immediately before and after the e-mails went out would shed light on what the Nutts knew and when they knew it. So he requested “any correspondence that Arkansas head football coach Houston Nutt and running-backs coach Danny Nutt have had with booster Teresa Prewett” between Nov. 1 and Feb. 28.

“I wanted to know what the truth was,” he said in an interview in April.

Instead of tediously culling the records of the coaches’ university-issued cell phone for calls and text messages to Prewett, the university mailed McAfee all the coaches’ phone records for the requested dates. McAfee’s request was one of several for Nutt’s cell phone records.

When he began plowing through the records, McAfee said, he was looking for communications between the Nutts and Prewett just before or after the Dec. 6-7 e-mails. He did discover that Houston and Danny Nutt exchanged several calls and text messages with Prewett on those dates.

He also noticed that another telephone number turned up over and over in Houston Nutt’s records. It turned out to be Bragg’s cell phone. Nutt and Bragg exchanged 1, 063 text messages between Nov. 30 and Jan. 11.

The data discovered in the phone logs soon made its way to the Internet.

A 48-page report, easily available on the Web, describes in detail not only Houston Nutt’s interaction with Prewett but also his communication with Bragg.

McAfee has said that he did not write the report but that he did hand Nutt’s phone records to friends.

During the meeting, Coulter said he and his client wanted to make it clear to the Nutt family that McAfee’s e-mails to trustees are not the same as what is on the Web.

“The scope of his e-mail is not nearly as broad as what is out there,” Coulter said.

They also hoped for different answers to the questions McAfee has raised about the coach of the team he has long supported. But he didn’t get them, Coulter said.

And no, the lawyer added, “He didn’t ask for an autograph.”