My Biggest Fear from the Bielema Erorr

[PygmalionEffect2]

You want to know my biggest fear, which stems from a perpetual situation?  Defensive athletes.  We struggle with that...and it's trending toward getting worse in many respects.  I'm convinced that it's largely because in Arkansas, with our low population, the best athletes ALWAYS land on offense.  As a result, we have to go outside the state and enjoy very little in state advantage with that.   

[Tusker4life]

I personally think the reason we are mediocre is we are for the most part, a clean program. Our basketball program is clean, and we have the most upperclassmen, there as well. Most of the other programs are becoming corrupt and more or less just a quick way to the pros. They can win because they get all the top players, just look at Bama in football and Kentucky in basketball, you can't tell me there isn't some underhanded stuff going on, case in point Louisville.

[wildhogman]

I share your concerns, OP. Many think this roster is more talented than it is. Throw in another small, low ranked, class and CCM may not be able to get the traction needed to make the program that gnat in the ear of the rest of the conference.

gnat?  so in your eyes we are just a gnat.  Like I said before, not sure your even a fan. But you definitely are the glass isn't half empty, its drained empty and dry as sand in the dessert. 

[PORKULATOR]

OP must hate the grammatical 'errors' that came out of the last regime. Leave Bret alone, stop calling him Bert, and grow up.

I get he was being cheeky era/error but....

[Boss Hog in the Arkansas]

Which error is THE error?

Blown lead at Rutgers. Barely beating Samford. Toledo. Pissing off Cliffy and the texas GOB. 56-3. Being Bret Bielema.The Akransas jersey. Take your pick.

[PonderinHog]

gnat?  so in your eyes we are just a gnat.  Like I said before, not sure your even a fan. But you definitely are the glass isn't half empty, its drained empty and dry as sand in the dessert.

There's nothing worse than sand in your dessert.

[bvillepig]

Guv I would help you out but don't have the energy to argue this over and over. My source was a Foundation Board member. Guv is telling like it is.

Long made a bunch of very bad decisions and it was just a matter of time. Horton, Dicus,  Bp and several others that I have forgotten. Long and his predecessor John White almost destroyed the U of A athletic department. Glad he is gone.

[Pork Twain]

This thread, no...

It all started with your spelling error and went straight south

[Razorbackers]

Why would I like being wrong on a boat? That makes no logical sense. As someone who is on a boat quite a bit...being "wrong" on a boat could very well get you killed. Especially this time of year striper fishing. So with that...this comment has a ring of trying to take this away from football discussion and a move towards making this personal...or am I reading you wrong? (I don't think I am) If you want to move this towards personal shots at each other that's no problem...I can play that game, with you especially. Pro flag burning, country hating liberals like yourself are easy to point a finger at. In case you didn't mean anything personal, I'm just kidding .

1st off I didn't quote the wrong person so you are wrong there to begin with. He quoted me, I quoted him back. Did you miss that? That's ok. Back to the original notion at hand...the idea that Petrino left little to zero talent on hand for Bielema to work with is not accurate.

The defense in particular got worse as time rolled on and all of Bielemas players cycled in (I know I know Rob Smith was 100% culprit, not Bielema) Guys like Chris Smith, Darius Philon, Robert Thomas, Trey Flowers, D. Wise, Tevin Mitchel, Rohan Gaines, Otha Peters, Taiwan Johnson are nothing to sneeze at. How many of those guys are in the NFL today? A few of them at least.

I get tired of this notion you guys have pushed the past few years of Petrino=bad, Bielema=awesome. Especially in light of the way it all played out in 2017.....absolute ****show. All of the sudden a thread started speaking of the hole Bielema has put us in (for sure national perception wise vs what we were with Nutt/Petrino) turns into what a great job he has done as far as what is left for Chad Morris to work with vs the dumpster fire Petrino supposedly left. 2015 is indeed your claim to fame. We did put up some big time offensive outputs that year on the back of Brandon Allen and Alex Collins no doubt. We won 8 games...I've said from year 1 and never wavered that Bielemas ceiling here was 8 wins. Lucky guess I suppose.

I was just providing different venues to be wrong at. But you're right, being wrong online is probably the safest.

No one said Petrino didn't leave anyone, I said that the program was a dumpster fire and the roster was depleted. And thank you so much for proving my point for me! The 2014 defense, which was so good, had absolutely no one behind them. Because, and this is where I circle back to previous points..

For the 2015 season, We had 14 players left COMBINED from the 2011 and 2012 recruiting classes.

Having a handful of talent left over was great. They were all gone after 2014, and there wasn't much left. That's been my point the entire time. You're too busy looking for ways to take a good point (Petrino recruited some talented players that were left over) while ignoring the other good points (he did a crap job building depth and his disastrous departure and a 1 year interim coach left a depleted roster for the next coach, which was evident by the massive amount of underclassmen who had to start on both sides of the ball from day 1) just because you have some personal agenda to push.

14 seniors. 14.

We're going to have 20+ seniors on next years roster. The team isn't in trouble academically. There have not been mass transfers, although a few are expected to happen for sure. We don't have an arrest happening every week.

Also, way to completely ignore the point that Petrino's vaunted offensive recruits were almost completely gone, and only Brandon Allen and Mitch Smothers were even contributors on the 2015 team (our 4 leading receivers were all Bielema guys!), which...AGAIN...was Bielema's most successful year at Arkansas.

So your continued claim that it "all went downhill after Petrino's guys left" is patently, 100%, completely, wholly, and painfully wrong. Yet, you continue to double down on the wrongness. Which explains your political views as well. lol

[Razorbackers]

Ah the good ole 'GuvHog fact'...which is defined as 'When two or more people say something of the same meaning at any point in time on any given thread on www.hogville.net.'

Anytime Guv and someone else start agreeing on something...

[wildhogman]

There's nothing worse than sand in your dessert.

ok you got me, and it made me laugh hard. Glad I was drinking something or you'd owe me a new monitor lol

[Pigsknuckles]

Keeping Baby Huey after the Toledo Loss.  That game should have been his Citadel.

Coastal Carolina was a reminder notice.

[jkstock04]

I was just providing different venues to be wrong at. But you're right, being wrong online is probably the safest.

No one said Petrino didn't leave anyone, I said that the program was a dumpster fire and the roster was depleted. And thank you so much for proving my point for me! The 2014 defense, which was so good, had absolutely no one behind them. Because, and this is where I circle back to previous points..

Having a handful of talent left over was great. They were all gone after 2014, and there wasn't much left. That's been my point the entire time. You're too busy looking for ways to take a good point (Petrino recruited some talented players that were left over) while ignoring the other good points (he did a crap job building depth and his disastrous departure and a 1 year interim coach left a depleted roster for the next coach, which was evident by the massive amount of underclassmen who had to start on both sides of the ball from day 1) just because you have some personal agenda to push.

14 seniors. 14.

We're going to have 20+ seniors on next years roster. The team isn't in trouble academically. There have not been mass transfers, although a few are expected to happen for sure. We don't have an arrest happening every week.

Also, way to completely ignore the point that Petrino's vaunted offensive recruits were almost completely gone, and only Brandon Allen and Mitch Smothers were even contributors on the 2015 team (our 4 leading receivers were all Bielema guys!), which...AGAIN...was Bielema's most successful year at Arkansas.

So your continued claim that it "all went downhill after Petrino's guys left" is patently, 100%, completely, wholly, and painfully wrong. Yet, you continue to double down on the wrongness. Which explains your political views as well. lol

Keon Hatcher didn't contribute much (or any) in 2015-2016? I don't have stats in front of me but I thought he would've been in there. Like I said, 2015 is your (& Bielemas) major claim to fame. Pinnacle of his success and yes with mostly his players. I did acknowledge that. Let's see if we have 20 plus Bielema seniors in 2021. I'm expecting a lot of defections due to change of culture and football philosophy, not because of an agenda against Bielema.

The problem I have with your analysis is it concludes that the numbers were going downhill regardless and Bielema simply caught the brunt of it. Your numbers assume guys like Mekale McKay (I believe he is in the NFL now) would've defected regardless of Petrinos job status. I don't see that as being so. We are going to see defections with this transition as well and I won't be the homer blaming it on Bielema and his recruiting if we suck in 2021...i can PROMISE you that.

[Inhogswetrust]

You do realize that there were members of the BOT that were so angry about Long firing Bobby that they wanted to fire Long too, Right?? They didn't have a majority of the votes so they just gave him enough rope to "Hang Himself" and he did just that. Bobby wasn't perfect, he did some things he shouldn't have but his wrongdoings didn't merit termination. 5 years later, Jeff Long finally paid the price for what he did to Bobby and to the football program. I'm not gonna lie, I felt like popping Champaign corks when Long's firing was announced.

You've always said give someone a second chance or more. You wanted Jeff to give that to Bobby yet you never would have given that to Jeff. Hypocritical to say the least.

[HeathWimp]

This thread, no...

It all started with your spelling error and went straight south

Maybe my erorr was in trying to incorporate some subtle humor into this thread....

[Athog]

is that Bert's disastrous tenure resulted in a "hard reset" of our program's potential.  Under Petrino, we were starting to see our potential for moving up to a higher level, say something on par with Oklahoma State.  We wouldn't win a national championship (or even a conference championship), but we would be nationally relevant every year.  We might not get the best recruits, but we would be recruiting at a much higher level.

However, Bert led us down a deep rabbit hole of lost games and poor recruiting.  The closest comparison I can think of is Kansas, after Mangino was dismissed for "integrity" reasons in 2008 (FWIW, I think his "integrity" issues were a lot more serious than Petrino's, but that ground has been covered before).  Since Mangino left, Kansas has gone through two coaches and is well on their way to running off a third, and they have become kryptonite to good recruits.

Sound familiar?  We are on our third coach since Petrino (yes, Smiley counts, since he was seriously thought of as someone who might have the interim tag removed).  We are not loved by recruits.  Heck, I'm not sure that other teams need to negative-recruit against us, since we are an afterthought with decent players.  I can't remember the last time we upset a highly-ranked team. 

Are we as bad as Kansas?  Probably not.  I think we could probably beat them on the field.  But are we similar to Kansas now?  Absolutely.  And we are in a much tougher conference.  My concern is that Bert dug such a deep hole that Morris won't be able to dig us out, and that this will be the new "state of affairs." 

Not anywhere near Kansas! Matter of fact the whole post is off!

[oldbooniehog]

Despite your hate of Bielema, the fact is Arkansas didn't fall that far because of him.

That's because Arkansas didn't have far to fall in the first place.

Arkansas has been, for decades now, a very-mediocre program.

The biggest moments in program history are "should have, would have could have" moments. I won't make the well-worn, well-known list here.

Even Petrino's absolute best team (won 11 games in 2011-12) finished 3rd in the SEC West.

The fact that Arkansas' other most recent 11-win season was 33 years prior to the 2011 season should speak volumes.

In contrast, Alabama has had 11 seasons of 11 or more wins since Arkansas joined the SEC.

Despite Petrino's awesomeness, his teams never once played for an SEC title.

In contrast, the much-reviled Houston Dale Nutt (Motho, Monkey with a whistle, all kinds of loving nicknames for old Hootie Dale) somehow managed to play for the SEC title twice, getting utterly destroyed by Georgia, and blowing it in classic Arkansas would-have, could-have-should-have fashion against Florida.


Since 1965, even at its absolute highest heights, Arkansas football has been an entertaining also-ran, second fiddle, like Ed McMahon, Robin the Boy Wonder, Tonto, Samwise Gamgee and Ronald Weasley all rolled into one.

Arkansas can be easily rebuilt to its "Former Glory" because it's a heck of a lot easier to rebuild a Walmart Neighborhood Market than the Colosseum of Rome.

Chad Morris will be able to easily continue the string of never winning an SEC title since joining the conference in 1992.

He'll easily have the team somewhere between really bad to solidly-second rate in the SEC, just like it's been for a quarter of a century.

Of course, even if Morris somehow manages to win 9 or 10 games a few times (The Dale did it four times) emotional-rollercoaster Hog fans will be screaming for him to be fired inside of 4 years because the Hogs still haven't won an SEC title, or a National Championship.

[Pork Twain]

Maybe my erorr was in trying to incorporate some subtle humor into this thread....

Nice try...nobody is buying it

[SooieGeneris]

An "official" vote was never taken. An Unofficial vote is a different story.

And where was this "unofficial" vote taken? Area 51?

[SooieGeneris]

Despite your hate of Bielema, the fact is Arkansas didn't fall that far because of him.

That's because Arkansas didn't have far to fall in the first place.

Arkansas has been, for decades now, a very-mediocre program.

The biggest moments in program history are "should have, would have could have" moments. I won't make the well-worn, well-known list here.

Even Petrino's absolute best team (won 11 games in 2011-12) finished 3rd in the SEC West.

The fact that Arkansas' other most recent 11-win season was 33 years prior to the 2011 season should speak volumes.

In contrast, Alabama has had 11 seasons of 11 or more wins since Arkansas joined the SEC.

Despite Petrino's awesomeness, his teams never once played for an SEC title.

In contrast, the much-reviled Houston Dale Nutt (Motho, Monkey with a whistle, all kinds of loving nicknames for old Hootie Dale) somehow managed to play for the SEC title twice, getting utterly destroyed by Georgia, and blowing it in classic Arkansas would-have, could-have-should-have fashion against Florida.


Since 1965, even at its absolute highest heights, Arkansas football has been an entertaining also-ran, second fiddle, like Ed McMahon, Robin the Boy Wonder, Tonto, Samwise Gamgee and Ronald Weasley all rolled into one.

Arkansas can be easily rebuilt to its "Former Glory" because it's a heck of a lot easier to rebuild a Walmart Neighborhood Market than the Colosseum of Rome.

Chad Morris will be able to easily continue the string of never winning an SEC title since joining the conference in 1992.

He'll easily have the team somewhere between really bad to solidly-second rate in the SEC, just like it's been for a quarter of a century.

Of course, even if Morris somehow manages to win 9 or 10 games a few times (The Dale did it four times) emotional-rollercoaster Hog fans will be screaming for him to be fired inside of 4 years because the Hogs still haven't won an SEC title, or a National Championship.

I'm not about to get into the debate about when Long should have been fired or should/shouldn't have fired BP. My position on that has been documented and hasn't changed.

As to the bolded statement in your post: BP; 12-4 in SEC play in 2010-11. BB: 11-29 in SEC play from 2013-2017. In other words, we won more SEC games in BPs last TWO seasons than BB won in FIVE.

This program has had it's moments in the SEC era, they've just been too few and farther between than in the SWC. Unlike Kansas of the Big 12.

In NO WAY does this program compare to Kansas in football due to one bad year or 2 bad years in 5 with mediocrity in between. I realize that was not your contention but that of the OP. However, that season you refer to when we were 3rd in the SEC West? We were #5 in the NATION in the final poll.

When was the last time ANY of our SEC rivals other than Alabama, Georgia, LSU or Auburn finished that high in the final poll? Not since that poll of Jan. 2012. That doesn't make us a juggernaut. Doesn't make us Kansas either, by a long shot!

[whosiskid]

I've pretty much stopped posting on Hogville for reasons of my own, but I felt compelled to point out what ought to be obvious: we are mediocre only because of circumstances. We are in the single toughest conference in the US. Strike that: toughest division. Year in and year out we have to play very close to the toughest schedule in the US. There have been several years where we were among the top twenty-five teams in the US and we just got chewed up playing Top Ten schools.

I don't see this changing any time soon. We could change conferences, lose a ton of money, but win a lot more games. We could cheat and pay students a ton of money to come to Arkansas a la Ole Miss, but I frankly wouldn't want to follow a program that had lost perspective like that. All we can really do is keep trying to do the best we can do. But the brute fact is that we will play an intensely competitive schedule year in and year out and lose a lot of games that we might have won if were were in the WAC or the Big East. This was all inevitable when we decided to leave the SWC for greatly increased Saturday paychecks. And this is made far worse by the fact that our state turns out less talent than any other state in the SEC except possibly Kentucky.

On Bielema, I'd like to flip things around. When we hired him, it was a gigantic coup. People nationwide were stunned that we made that hire. Here on HV we all too often think that Bielema failed us, but nationwide I'm not sure that is the perspective. I think most people who are not Arkansas fans believe that we failed Bielema. I mean, here was a guy who had persistent success at Wisconsin, and he came to Arkansas and his career dipped. I'm not trying to argue that we did in fact fail him or that he failed us. I'm simply stating that most of the country may have a different perspective on all this. We made a big time hire and it didn't work out. Now people are going to see Arkansas as a place where top coaches may not find the optimal situation. I'm afraid that our future - at least until we get lucky and find some considerable success with a new Frank Broyles (who came to Arkansas and achieved a degree of success we'd not previously seen) - is going to be to find coaches who can succeed with less than premiere talent. For all the problems with Petrino - and while I loved watching his offenses, he was a jerk who created the situation where he had to be fired - he could create a very exciting offense with players who would not have been as productive under other coaches. I am hoping that Morris will be a slightly less creepy Petrino (though I hate the spread and I'm not looking forward to that).


But look, we are still a small state whose university is smaller than the other schools in the SEC with far less instate talent. Competing is always going to be a challenge for us. We are usually going to be above Vanderbilt and Kentucky but below Alabama and Florida and LSU. In fact, things could have been worse. Tennessee and Florida have been in slumps for the past decade. If those two programs get back to where they ought to be, things could be even tougher for us. But the worst thing about Bielema is that we failed to create the environment where someone considered to be a high quality coach like him was able to succeed. That is how most of the nation is going to see this, not that Bielema screwed up. To see things otherwise is to have a sense of entitlement. The brute fact is that Bielema did about as good as he could given the paucity of instate talent and the size of the university.

On a final note, I sort of started leaving Hogville precisely two years ago when I was absolutely reamed for stating as tamely as possible that I didn't think the 2017 class was shaping up to be a very good one (and I feel the 2018 was shaping up to be nearly as bad - Bielema's leaving obviously created the kind of uncertainty where recruiting is difficult, and while it would have been a better class had Bielema remained, it nonetheless wasn't going to be a particularly stellar one, Bumper Pool and Connor Noland aside). It seemed to me that a kind of unreality was setting in here, where really average juco players, or bland offensive HS linemen who couldn't get recruited by most of the teams in the SEC were suddenly perceived as future All Americans. I have my own opinion as to why that happened (and it is part of the nature of boards like this, where to a degree they are an adjunct to recruiting proper, so that you can't really say negative things about players we were recruiting without possibly having a negative impact on recruiting), but there isn't a good place to talk about that sort of thing. But I bring this up to point out that we could be in for a couple of tough years. The last two recruiting classes - 2017 and 2018 - were really not very good. So the talent on campus is below what it has been for some time. And while I like what I've seen so far in Morris, it takes a good 2 or even 3 years before you build the kind of relationships you need. The only thing that might save us is that 2019 is an unusually good year for instate talent. But unless Morris can do an even better job than Petrino did of taking below average talent and coaching it up, we could see a couple of tough years. I hope not, but it wouldn't surprise me.

[whosiskid]

Despite your hate of Bielema, the fact is Arkansas didn't fall that far because of him.

That's because Arkansas didn't have far to fall in the first place.

Arkansas has been, for decades now, a very-mediocre program.

The biggest moments in program history are "should have, would have could have" moments. I won't make the well-worn, well-known list here.

Even Petrino's absolute best team (won 11 games in 2011-12) finished 3rd in the SEC West.

The fact that Arkansas' other most recent 11-win season was 33 years prior to the 2011 season should speak volumes.

In contrast, Alabama has had 11 seasons of 11 or more wins since Arkansas joined the SEC.

Despite Petrino's awesomeness, his teams never once played for an SEC title.

In contrast, the much-reviled Houston Dale Nutt (Motho, Monkey with a whistle, all kinds of loving nicknames for old Hootie Dale) somehow managed to play for the SEC title twice, getting utterly destroyed by Georgia, and blowing it in classic Arkansas would-have, could-have-should-have fashion against Florida.


Since 1965, even at its absolute highest heights, Arkansas football has been an entertaining also-ran, second fiddle, like Ed McMahon, Robin the Boy Wonder, Tonto, Samwise Gamgee and Ronald Weasley all rolled into one.

Arkansas can be easily rebuilt to its "Former Glory" because it's a heck of a lot easier to rebuild a Walmart Neighborhood Market than the Colosseum of Rome.

Chad Morris will be able to easily continue the string of never winning an SEC title since joining the conference in 1992.

He'll easily have the team somewhere between really bad to solidly-second rate in the SEC, just like it's been for a quarter of a century.

Of course, even if Morris somehow manages to win 9 or 10 games a few times (The Dale did it four times) emotional-rollercoaster Hog fans will be screaming for him to be fired inside of 4 years because the Hogs still haven't won an SEC title, or a National Championship.

No. You can't compare what happened under the Nutt years to what happened under Petrino, Bielema, or Morris.Why? Because Nutt was in a different situation with regard to recruiting. He would recruit everyone and their dog (and cat) and hope that some of them would pan out. What would Nutt have achieved had he been limited to 25 players a year? Nutt gambled on a LOT of marginal players that subsequent coaches have not been able to. Players could get a scholarship to Arkansas, and then they would have to compete to make the roster, unlike today, where nearly everyone we offer a scholarship to ends up on the roster. We'll never see a situation like what we had under Nutt again. We can't gamble on players any longer. Not saying that that is good or bad, just that Nutt's days are long gone.

[Melancholy_Pigg]

And now we look back and see through a glass darkly..

I will always wish we would have found a way to keep Bobby.  Ain't none of us perfect, and the man could coach and brought us success.  As far as we know, he ran a clean program. He wasn't the first or last man to have an affair and make a fool of himself - and he did do that.  No argument on that one from me.

IDK if we look any less foolish though after Bielema.  And a lot of that stuff with Long and Bielema and the $$ and how it was worked - well let's just say some of that integrity shine came off.

All we can do is get behind Morris - and I think we got a lot to be positive about.  I really do.  But yes probably something of a hard reset.

But no way are we Kansas.  Morris gets us going again and in a short while we'll be back.  Kansas has issues that you don't solve in one or two turnaround seasons.  Morris fires it up and wins some games and we're back in biz.

GO HOGS!!

[wachhog]

is that Bert's disastrous tenure resulted in a "hard reset" of our program's potential.  Under Petrino, we were starting to see our potential for moving up to a higher level, say something on par with Oklahoma State.  We wouldn't win a national championship (or even a conference championship), but we would be nationally relevant every year.  We might not get the best recruits, but we would be recruiting at a much higher level.

However, Bert led us down a deep rabbit hole of lost games and poor recruiting.  The closest comparison I can think of is Kansas, after Mangino was dismissed for "integrity" reasons in 2008 (FWIW, I think his "integrity" issues were a lot more serious than Petrino's, but that ground has been covered before).  Since Mangino left, Kansas has gone through two coaches and is well on their way to running off a third, and they have become kryptonite to good recruits.

Sound familiar?  We are on our third coach since Petrino (yes, Smiley counts, since he was seriously thought of as someone who might have the interim tag removed).  We are not loved by recruits.  Heck, I'm not sure that other teams need to negative-recruit against us, since we are an afterthought with decent players.  I can't remember the last time we upset a highly-ranked team. 

Are we as bad as Kansas?  Probably not.  I think we could probably beat them on the field.  But are we similar to Kansas now?  Absolutely.  And we are in a much tougher conference.  My concern is that Bert dug such a deep hole that Morris won't be able to dig us out, and that this will be the new "state of affairs."

We exchanged lightning in a bottle for fatty in flip flops. The rest is history.

[Supermark101]

This trend we are currently on is the longest ever and says otherwise.

The "trend" is no worse than Ford's last two years I'd argue we are in a very simular position as 1998.

[Russ22]

The "trend" is no worse than Ford's last two years I'd argue we are in a very simular position as 1998.

Ford stockpiled DUDES in the trenches and was a NC winning coach. The hogs might have similar skill as 1998 but they do not resemble the 1998 team along the LOS.

[Lao Tsuie]

 Ooo Our potential is to get up to the lever of osu ? 

[Supermark101]

Ford stockpiled DUDES in the trenches and was a NC winning coach. The hogs might have similar skill as 1998 but they do not resemble the 1998 team along the LOS.

Maybe so, but you say that with hinesight. I don't remember those dudes setting the world on fire in 97. What does winning a NC have to do with Arkansas and his last two years here.

Ooo Our potential is to get up to the lever of osu ?

In the Big 12, no.

In the SEC as long as Alabama and LSU are off probation, honestly yes. Even Patrino didn't have us above an OSU level.

[Lao Tsuie]

We have beaten LSU and no one is beating Bama except on rare occasions. But no, there isnt a hard reset in CF. The situation is fluid.

[Lao Tsuie]

 We just suffered through a "bb wind egg". The air will start to clear this spring.

[steveaustin69]

I'm not about to get into the debate about when Long should have been fired or should/shouldn't have fired BP. My position on that has been documented and hasn't changed.

As to the bolded statement in your post: BP; 12-4 in SEC play in 2010-11. BB: 11-29 in SEC play from 2013-2017. In other words, we won more SEC games in BPs last TWO seasons than BB won in FIVE.

This program has had it's moments in the SEC era, they've just been too few and farther between than in the SWC. Unlike Kansas of the Big 12.

In NO WAY does this program compare to Kansas in football due to one bad year or 2 bad years in 5 with mediocrity in between. I realize that was not your contention but that of the OP. However, that season you refer to when we were 3rd in the SEC West? We were #5 in the NATION in the final poll.

When was the last time ANY of our SEC rivals other than Alabama, Georgia, LSU or Auburn finished that high in the final poll? Not since that poll of Jan. 2012. That doesn't make us a juggernaut. Doesn't make us Kansas either, by a long shot!

Who cares? The point is with one of our best teams and a top 20 coach(at the time many would argue top 5) we still didn't get over the hump.

Yeah, well, three of those teams are in our own division.  Are you hanging your hat on being fourth best in the division (we are also not the fourth best program in our division FYI)?

[steveaustin69]

No. You can't compare what happened under the Nutt years to what happened under Petrino, Bielema, or Morris.Why? Because Nutt was in a different situation with regard to recruiting. He would recruit everyone and their dog (and cat) and hope that some of them would pan out. What would Nutt have achieved had he been limited to 25 players a year? Nutt gambled on a LOT of marginal players that subsequent coaches have not been able to. Players could get a scholarship to Arkansas, and then they would have to compete to make the roster, unlike today, where nearly everyone we offer a scholarship to ends up on the roster. We'll never see a situation like what we had under Nutt again. We can't gamble on players any longer. Not saying that that is good or bad, just that Nutt's days are long gone.

Yes, you can compare them.  Other teams could do the same.  We didn't have some scholarship advantage relative to our competitors.

[steveaustin69]

I've pretty much stopped posting on Hogville for reasons of my own, but I felt compelled to point out what ought to be obvious: we are mediocre only because of circumstances. We are in the single toughest conference in the US. Strike that: toughest division. Year in and year out we have to play very close to the toughest schedule in the US. There have been several years where we were among the top twenty-five teams in the US and we just got chewed up playing Top Ten schools.

I don't see this changing any time soon. We could change conferences, lose a ton of money, but win a lot more games. We could cheat and pay students a ton of money to come to Arkansas a la Ole Miss, but I frankly wouldn't want to follow a program that had lost perspective like that. All we can really do is keep trying to do the best we can do. But the brute fact is that we will play an intensely competitive schedule year in and year out and lose a lot of games that we might have won if were were in the WAC or the Big East. This was all inevitable when we decided to leave the SWC for greatly increased Saturday paychecks. And this is made far worse by the fact that our state turns out less talent than any other state in the SEC except possibly Kentucky.

On Bielema, I'd like to flip things around. When we hired him, it was a gigantic coup. People nationwide were stunned that we made that hire. Here on HV we all too often think that Bielema failed us, but nationwide I'm not sure that is the perspective. I think most people who are not Arkansas fans believe that we failed Bielema. I mean, here was a guy who had persistent success at Wisconsin, and he came to Arkansas and his career dipped. I'm not trying to argue that we did in fact fail him or that he failed us. I'm simply stating that most of the country may have a different perspective on all this. We made a big time hire and it didn't work out. Now people are going to see Arkansas as a place where top coaches may not find the optimal situation. I'm afraid that our future - at least until we get lucky and find some considerable success with a new Frank Broyles (who came to Arkansas and achieved a degree of success we'd not previously seen) - is going to be to find coaches who can succeed with less than premiere talent. For all the problems with Petrino - and while I loved watching his offenses, he was a jerk who created the situation where he had to be fired - he could create a very exciting offense with players who would not have been as productive under other coaches. I am hoping that Morris will be a slightly less creepy Petrino (though I hate the spread and I'm not looking forward to that).


But look, we are still a small state whose university is smaller than the other schools in the SEC with far less instate talent. Competing is always going to be a challenge for us. We are usually going to be above Vanderbilt and Kentucky but below Alabama and Florida and LSU. In fact, things could have been worse. Tennessee and Florida have been in slumps for the past decade. If those two programs get back to where they ought to be, things could be even tougher for us. But the worst thing about Bielema is that we failed to create the environment where someone considered to be a high quality coach like him was able to succeed. That is how most of the nation is going to see this, not that Bielema screwed up. To see things otherwise is to have a sense of entitlement. The brute fact is that Bielema did about as good as he could given the paucity of instate talent and the size of the university.

On a final note, I sort of started leaving Hogville precisely two years ago when I was absolutely reamed for stating as tamely as possible that I didn't think the 2017 class was shaping up to be a very good one (and I feel the 2018 was shaping up to be nearly as bad - Bielema's leaving obviously created the kind of uncertainty where recruiting is difficult, and while it would have been a better class had Bielema remained, it nonetheless wasn't going to be a particularly stellar one, Bumper Pool and Connor Noland aside). It seemed to me that a kind of unreality was setting in here, where really average juco players, or bland offensive HS linemen who couldn't get recruited by most of the teams in the SEC were suddenly perceived as future All Americans. I have my own opinion as to why that happened (and it is part of the nature of boards like this, where to a degree they are an adjunct to recruiting proper, so that you can't really say negative things about players we were recruiting without possibly having a negative impact on recruiting), but there isn't a good place to talk about that sort of thing. But I bring this up to point out that we could be in for a couple of tough years. The last two recruiting classes - 2017 and 2018 - were really not very good. So the talent on campus is below what it has been for some time. And while I like what I've seen so far in Morris, it takes a good 2 or even 3 years before you build the kind of relationships you need. The only thing that might save us is that 2019 is an unusually good year for instate talent. But unless Morris can do an even better job than Petrino did of taking below average talent and coaching it up, we could see a couple of tough years. I hope not, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Not gonna read your novel after you posted we need to "keep trying."  Big 12 schools received $5M less than SEC schools from the conference. Not a "ton" of money in this climate/industry.

[Russ22]

Maybe so, but you say that with hinesight. I don't remember those dudes setting the world on fire in 97. What does winning a NC have to do with Arkansas and his last two years here.

In the Big 12, no.

In the SEC as long as Alabama and LSU are off probation, honestly yes. Even Patrino didn't have us above an OSU level.

I mentioned fords NC because that means he knew how to coach & evaluate talent. The 1998 team would have been very good with ford as HC

[GuvHog]

I was just providing different venues to be wrong at. But you're right, being wrong online is probably the safest.

No one said Petrino didn't leave anyone, I said that the program was a dumpster fire and the roster was depleted. And thank you so much for proving my point for me! The 2014 defense, which was so good, had absolutely no one behind them. Because, and this is where I circle back to previous points..

Having a handful of talent left over was great. They were all gone after 2014, and there wasn't much left. That's been my point the entire time. You're too busy looking for ways to take a good point (Petrino recruited some talented players that were left over) while ignoring the other good points (he did a crap job building depth and his disastrous departure and a 1 year interim coach left a depleted roster for the next coach, which was evident by the massive amount of underclassmen who had to start on both sides of the ball from day 1) just because you have some personal agenda to push.

14 seniors. 14.

We're going to have 20+ seniors on next years roster. The team isn't in trouble academically. There have not been mass transfers, although a few are expected to happen for sure. We don't have an arrest happening every week.

Also, way to completely ignore the point that Petrino's vaunted offensive recruits were almost completely gone, and only Brandon Allen and Mitch Smothers were even contributors on the 2015 team (our 4 leading receivers were all Bielema guys!), which...AGAIN...was Bielema's most successful year at Arkansas.

So your continued claim that it "all went downhill after Petrino's guys left" is patently, 100%, completely, wholly, and painfully wrong. Yet, you continue to double down on the wrongness. Which explains your political views as well. lol

This is pure poppycock. The reason nothing was left after 2014 is because Bielema was a vey poor defensive recruiter in his first couple of years at Arkansas. He didn't really improve in that area until the class of 2015 but by then, the damage had been done. the claim that BP left a depleted roster is totally FALSE.

[GuvHog]

You've always said give someone a second chance or more. You wanted Jeff to give that to Bobby yet you never would have given that to Jeff. Hypocritical to say the least.

Jeff Long had many "Second Chances".  He blew it too many times. When Long was hired, there were red flags but at John White's insistence, the BOT ignored them and the football program was destroyed. When Long fired Petrino, I stated that Longs days at the U of A were numbered and I was right. Long's hiring of Bielema and Bielema's failure was simply the last straw.

[ricepig]

Jeff Long had many "Second Chances".  He blew it too many times. When Long was hired, there were red flags but at John White's insistence, the BOT ignored them and the football program was destroyed. When Long fired Petrino, I stated that Longs days at the U of A were numbered and I was right. Long's hiring of Bielema and Bielema's failure was simply the last straw.

Guess what Guv, Morris' days are numbered, lol, and I'll be right.

[Razorbackers]

Keon Hatcher didn't contribute much (or any) in 2015-2016? I don't have stats in front of me but I thought he would've been in there. Like I said, 2015 is your (& Bielemas) major claim to fame. Pinnacle of his success and yes with mostly his players. I did acknowledge that. Let's see if we have 20 plus Bielema seniors in 2021. I'm expecting a lot of defections due to change of culture and football philosophy, not because of an agenda against Bielema.

The problem I have with your analysis is it concludes that the numbers were going downhill regardless and Bielema simply caught the brunt of it. Your numbers assume guys like Mekale McKay (I believe he is in the NFL now) would've defected regardless of Petrinos job status. I don't see that as being so. We are going to see defections with this transition as well and I won't be the homer blaming it on Bielema and his recruiting if we suck in 2021...i can PROMISE you that.

Hatcher only played in 2 games due to injury. He certainly would have contributed, though.

We're not talking about what would have or could have happened. Where the heck did McKay come from? We're talking about what happened and what is real. That's a pretty big goalpost move there. My number don't assume anything, they are just numbers. Good lord.

[seasonhog]

False. Look at the starting defense of 2014. Most of them were Petrino recruits. There were a number of Petrino recruits starting on the offense that year too. Petrino's players didn't care for him as a person but they respected him as a Head Coach because his system worked so they wanted to be part of it. You're wrong about him. Jeff Long and Smiley created the dumpster fire that CBB inherited.

" GuvHog "  know what he is talking about......right on!

Drill Sergeant are not liked....but they get the job done....as far as coaches go BP may have been the best we ever had at the U of A

[Al Boarland]

I've pretty much stopped posting on Hogville for reasons of my own, but I felt compelled to point out what ought to be obvious: we are mediocre only because of circumstances. We are in the single toughest conference in the US. Strike that: toughest division. Year in and year out we have to play very close to the toughest schedule in the US. There have been several years where we were among the top twenty-five teams in the US and we just got chewed up playing Top Ten schools.

I don't see this changing any time soon. We could change conferences, lose a ton of money, but win a lot more games. We could cheat and pay students a ton of money to come to Arkansas a la Ole Miss, but I frankly wouldn't want to follow a program that had lost perspective like that. All we can really do is keep trying to do the best we can do. But the brute fact is that we will play an intensely competitive schedule year in and year out and lose a lot of games that we might have won if were were in the WAC or the Big East. This was all inevitable when we decided to leave the SWC for greatly increased Saturday paychecks. And this is made far worse by the fact that our state turns out less talent than any other state in the SEC except possibly Kentucky.

On Bielema, I'd like to flip things around. When we hired him, it was a gigantic coup. People nationwide were stunned that we made that hire. Here on HV we all too often think that Bielema failed us, but nationwide I'm not sure that is the perspective. I think most people who are not Arkansas fans believe that we failed Bielema. I mean, here was a guy who had persistent success at Wisconsin, and he came to Arkansas and his career dipped. I'm not trying to argue that we did in fact fail him or that he failed us. I'm simply stating that most of the country may have a different perspective on all this. We made a big time hire and it didn't work out. Now people are going to see Arkansas as a place where top coaches may not find the optimal situation. I'm afraid that our future - at least until we get lucky and find some considerable success with a new Frank Broyles (who came to Arkansas and achieved a degree of success we'd not previously seen) - is going to be to find coaches who can succeed with less than premiere talent. For all the problems with Petrino - and while I loved watching his offenses, he was a jerk who created the situation where he had to be fired - he could create a very exciting offense with players who would not have been as productive under other coaches. I am hoping that Morris will be a slightly less creepy Petrino (though I hate the spread and I'm not looking forward to that).


But look, we are still a small state whose university is smaller than the other schools in the SEC with far less instate talent. Competing is always going to be a challenge for us. We are usually going to be above Vanderbilt and Kentucky but below Alabama and Florida and LSU. In fact, things could have been worse. Tennessee and Florida have been in slumps for the past decade. If those two programs get back to where they ought to be, things could be even tougher for us. But the worst thing about Bielema is that we failed to create the environment where someone considered to be a high quality coach like him was able to succeed. That is how most of the nation is going to see this, not that Bielema screwed up. To see things otherwise is to have a sense of entitlement. The brute fact is that Bielema did about as good as he could given the paucity of instate talent and the size of the university.

On a final note, I sort of started leaving Hogville precisely two years ago when I was absolutely reamed for stating as tamely as possible that I didn't think the 2017 class was shaping up to be a very good one (and I feel the 2018 was shaping up to be nearly as bad - Bielema's leaving obviously created the kind of uncertainty where recruiting is difficult, and while it would have been a better class had Bielema remained, it nonetheless wasn't going to be a particularly stellar one, Bumper Pool and Connor Noland aside). It seemed to me that a kind of unreality was setting in here, where really average juco players, or bland offensive HS linemen who couldn't get recruited by most of the teams in the SEC were suddenly perceived as future All Americans. I have my own opinion as to why that happened (and it is part of the nature of boards like this, where to a degree they are an adjunct to recruiting proper, so that you can't really say negative things about players we were recruiting without possibly having a negative impact on recruiting), but there isn't a good place to talk about that sort of thing. But I bring this up to point out that we could be in for a couple of tough years. The last two recruiting classes - 2017 and 2018 - were really not very good. So the talent on campus is below what it has been for some time. And while I like what I've seen so far in Morris, it takes a good 2 or even 3 years before you build the kind of relationships you need. The only thing that might save us is that 2019 is an unusually good year for instate talent. But unless Morris can do an even better job than Petrino did of taking below average talent and coaching it up, we could see a couple of tough years. I hope not, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Bravo.

[Razorbackers]

" GuvHog "  know what he is talking about......right on!

Drill Sergeant are not liked....but they get the job done....as far as coaches go BP may have been the best we ever had at the U of A

So our best coach ever never even won his division.

Cool.

[BoynamedWooPigSooie]

is that Bert's disastrous tenure resulted in a "hard reset" of our program's potential.  Under Petrino, we were starting to see our potential for moving up to a higher level, say something on par with Oklahoma State.  We wouldn't win a national championship (or even a conference championship), but we would be nationally relevant every year.  We might not get the best recruits, but we would be recruiting at a much higher level.

However, Bert led us down a deep rabbit hole of lost games and poor recruiting.  The closest comparison I can think of is Kansas, after Mangino was dismissed for "integrity" reasons in 2008 (FWIW, I think his "integrity" issues were a lot more serious than Petrino's, but that ground has been covered before).  Since Mangino left, Kansas has gone through two coaches and is well on their way to running off a third, and they have become kryptonite to good recruits.

Sound familiar?  We are on our third coach since Petrino (yes, Smiley counts, since he was seriously thought of as someone who might have the interim tag removed).  We are not loved by recruits.  Heck, I'm not sure that other teams need to negative-recruit against us, since we are an afterthought with decent players.  I can't remember the last time we upset a highly-ranked team. 

Are we as bad as Kansas?  Probably not.  I think we could probably beat them on the field.  But are we similar to Kansas now?  Absolutely.  And we are in a much tougher conference.  My concern is that Bert dug such a deep hole that Morris won't be able to dig us out, and that this will be the new "state of affairs."

Do you know how pathetic it is to think we could be on par with Oklahoma State? Seriously.

Arkansas was nationally relevant for decades. DECADES.

Arkansas was a top tier program and a leader in collegiate sports. A breeding ground for coaching talent. A place that was looked at where you went as an up and coming coach to learn from Coach Broyles.

Unfortunately that kinda went away in the 90's. Nutt kept his merry band of bros and yes men rather than identifying young, hungry coaching talent. Nutt's ego and frail self-consciousness wouldn't allow him to grow the program and Broyles being at the end of his career just kinda rolled over.

Coach Morris has a roadmap and it has the ingredients that made Arkansas a program that continuously punched above its weight.

[steveaustin69]

Do you know how pathetic it is to think we could be on par with Oklahoma State? Seriously.

Arkansas was nationally relevant for decades. DECADES.

Arkansas was a top tier program and a leader in collegiate sports. A breeding ground for coaching talent. A place that was looked at where you went as an up and coming coach to learn from Coach Broyles.

Unfortunately that kinda went away in the 90's. Nutt kept his merry band of bros and yes men rather than identifying young, hungry coaching talent. Nutt's ego and frail self-consciousness wouldn't allow him to grow the program and Broyles being at the end of his career just kinda rolled over.

Coach Morris has a roadmap and it has the ingredients that made Arkansas a program that continuously punched above its weight.

Do you know how pathetic it is to hang onto fifty years ago? Five DECADES.

Oklahoma State is 103-40 in the past decade. Arkansas is 75-64. Winning almost 30 more ball games seems pretty good to me.

[GuvHog]

Guess what Guv, Morris' days are numbered, lol, and I'll be right.

I believe Morris is going to surprise some people. I believe the Hogs have found their
"Diamond in the Rough" in Morris.

[ricepig]

Do you know how pathetic it is to hang onto fifty years ago? Five DECADES.

Oklahoma State is 103-40 in the past decade. Arkansas is 75-64. Winning almost 30 more ball games seems pretty good to me.

Do you know how pathetic it is to always want your way?

[GuvHog]

So our best coach ever never even won his division.

Cool.

Nope in 2010 and 2011, the SEC West Champion also happened to be the National Champion. Bama will always be Bama, and occasionally either LSU or Auburn will knock them off. Arkansas did finish second in the SEC West standings in 2010 behind National Champion Auburn.

[steveaustin69]

Do you know how pathetic it is to always want your way?

What are you getting at?

[steveaustin69]

Nope in 2010 and 2011, the SEC West Champion also happened to be the National Champion. Bama will always be Bama, and occasionally either LSU or Auburn will knock them off. Arkansas did finish second in the SEC West standings in 2010 behind National Champion Auburn.

Yep.

[urkillnmesmalls]

What are you getting at?

Not sure what he's getting at, but what I'm getting at is that you go from thread to thread with the same tired drivel.  "I want to move to the Big 12 where we can win more games." 

You come off as a spoiled brat kid who gets schooled on the basketball court, or tackled too hard, and takes their ball and goes home. 

"If I can't make things easier...I'll just go play with the younger kids who aren't as good." 

You talk about how pathetic it is to look at the last 5 decades, but just a week ago you, Ego, and Busta used statistics from that very era to attempt to prove that we would win more games if we were in the Big 12.  You can't have it both ways man....

How about if you start participating in threads in ways other than whining about not moving to the Big 12?  I don't know where you ever got the notion that might happen, but you need to put it go bed. 

[steveaustin69]

Not sure what he's getting at, but what I'm getting at is that you go from thread to thread with the same tired drivel.  "I want to move to the Big 12 where we can win more games." 

You come off as a spoiled brat kid who gets schooled on the basketball court, or tackled too hard, and takes their ball and goes home. 

"If I can't make things easier...I'll just go play with the younger kids who aren't as good." 

You talk about how pathetic it is to look at the last 5 decades, but just a week ago you, Ego, and Busta used statistics from that very era to attempt to prove that we would win more games if we were in the Big 12.  You can't have it both ways man....

How about if you start participating in threads in ways other than whining about not moving to the Big 12?  I don't know where you ever got the notion that might happen, but you need to put it go bed.

Someone made a direct comparison to Oklahoma State. Another said that was pathetic. I pointed out Oklahoma State has been a good program for a decade. I know reading isn't your strong suit, but be better next time.