  We study excited baryon decay widths in large N_c QCD. It was suggested
previously that some spin-flavor mixed-symmetric baryon states have strong
couplings of O(N_c^{-1/2}) to nucleons [implying narrow widths of O(1/N_c)], as
opposed to the generic expectation based on Witten's counting rules of an
O(N_c^0) coupling. The calculation obtaining these narrow widths was performed
in the context of a simple quark-shell model. This paper addresses the question
of whether the existence of such narrow states is a general property of large
N_c QCD. We show that a general large N_c QCD analysis does not predict such
narrow states; rather they are a consequence of the extreme simplicity of the
quark model.
