This is my 13th year of Pearls, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to have turned into Cormac McCarthy in the process.
Much like reading the preeminent author’s “The Road,” opining on Razorback football has been unflinchingly bleak at times. And following this 2023 season, it’s fair to say that the program’s resurgence under embattled coach Sam Pittman seems as distant as ever.
Hunter Yurachek, whose praises I sang in a cover piece only 18 short months ago, now finds himself in a tight spot, too. It’s a justified one, because over the span of two months, I saw a confident, aggressive athletic director regress in his own decision making.
And arguably, it was Yurachek’s decision to extend Pittman’s deal after the 2022 Outback Bowl win that might’ve been the first domino to tip the wrong direction. Pittman’s first two seasons went far better than anyone expected, and he was cleaning up in the transfer portal along with motivating a fairly appreciable bit of talent that Chad Morris left behind.
Again, to his immense credit, Pittman sold his shiny product on guys like Zach Williams, John Ridgeway, Jordan Domineck, Drew Sanders, Matt Landers, Jadon Haselwood, Landon Jackson and Dwight “Nudie” McGlothern. He even dragged some former Hog targets (Jacolby Criswell and Ty’Kieast Crawford, to name a pair) back to the Hill.
The things that went wrong in 2022 seemed fairly fixable, too. The mercurial 7-6 squad narrowly missed opportunities to beat Texas A&M and LSU, competed but crashed against Alabama and Missouri, and suffered a bad loss to Liberty thanks to KJ Jefferson’s lingering injury. In fact, losses to Mississippi State, LSU and Liberty all seemed to be a function of Jefferson’s lower body injury that sidelined him for two whole games and impacted his two-way abilities in the Liberty loss, too.
In theory, then, Pittman even addressed that problem with Criswell’s arrival and four-star early enrollee Malachi Singleton coming to campus. Jefferson and Raheim Sanders showed up for 2023 invigorated and healthy, with extra muscle and motivation stemming from the failings that dogged last year’s team.
Of course, “in theory” is basically the qualifier for every season of Arkansas football. Irrespective of this altered universe of name, image and likeness (NIL) money, this is the Razorback football legacy: Everything comes up roses until a week to a month after Labor Day, when it all seemingly crashes.
Hell, even Pittman seemed to fix that issue in 2021. After a hot 4-0 start, three straight losses had the Hogs reeling, but they rallied to win five of their last six. Even in that one loss to Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Arkansas traded blows with the Tide for three hours.
All that competitive grit faded this season quickly. The loss to BYU exposed the fact that Dan Enos was already a terrible hire for the personnel he had, and then the unfathomable four-game gauntlet away from home crushed the team’s spirits permanently as it meandered from awful to competitive and back again down the stretch.
The losses to Mississippi State, Auburn and finally Missouri in a garish 48-14 finale all cemented the fact that Pittman’s game-to-game, day-to-day management of the team disappeared in a trice. After he beat Florida International, like any competent coach should, he got a premature vote of confidence from Yurachek. Instead of being buoyed by that commitment, the team floundered yet again at Reynolds Razorback Stadium.
These aren’t good times, and the next few weeks might make it worse. Pittman’s lame-duck status arrived on the heels of a number of schools paying exorbitant buyouts to exiting coaches, which of course brought to mind the shell-out given to Bret Bielema in 2017 that everyone hated plenty.
Bielema’s 5-3 mark in 2015, ironically, was the only winning SEC season Arkansas has had in these last dozen years. Pittman had departed for Georgia’s staff after the 2014 season, and in another bit of regrettable irony, left behind such a solid offensive line that fans largely welcomed him back five years later as the next potential savior.
Pittman’s timing for trying out his head coaching chops really was unfair to him. The Supreme Court ushered in the NIL era, and there’s just no template yet for how to rebuild and maintain a mediocre but proud program. His vaunted reputation as a recruiter and position coach might’ve meant more pre-2021.
This 4-8 (1-7 SEC) season might fool one into thinking this was similar to the one that cost Bielema his job six years ago. In carving out that same overall and league record, though, Bielema had plenty of opportunities to save himself that went awry. The Hogs lost, rather narrowly, to Texas A&M, Mississippi State and Missouri, and therefore might’ve scratched their way back to a winnable bowl.
Not once did the 2023 team appear to deserve another postseason game. Sure, the Hogs played hard at times, but never mistake-free. Jefferson wasn’t himself, Sanders got too big and too dinged up, and other than Andrew Armstrong and a couple of decent defensive cogs like Antonio Grier and Trajan Jeffcoat, none of the newcomers did much. Placekicker Cam Little was the most dependable and productive player on the team, which says a lot about both Little’s incredible acumen but is also a referendum on the team’s failing performance.
Already sour, the Hog fanbase winced collectively when Yurachek announced Pittman’s return, then melted down all over again when Mizzou coach Eli Drinkwitz took triumphant puffs off a cigar after the latest embarrassment was complete. Here’s a native Arkansan who has not only built up the Battle Line Rivalry plenty, but also taken three of four against the Hogs and progressively molded a 10-win, Top 10 group.
Oh, and his predecessor Barry Odom left Arkansas nearly a year ago to get back into head coaching. Odom’s taken a moribund UNLV program and turned it into a 9-3 conference co-champion, which might have made him an enticing candidate to return to Arkansas — had Yurachek not showed his imminently beatable hand a week early.
So this “Road” would appear every bit as arduous as the one McCarthy painstakingly detailed, just not in the same post-apocalyptic manner. Although, in April 2012, Bobby Petrino showed up to a press conference abraded and braced, and the Hogs are 24-74 in SEC play from that day forward. Eight of those victories are against the Mississippi schools, which means that the Hogs have losing records against every team in the conference except Tennessee (2-0, winning in 2015 and 2020).
Maybe that counts as catastrophic after all.