Happy Election Day, folks. Surely the next 24 hours will go just fine, right?
The non-stop political coverage and campaign text messages have been blowing up people’s phones for weeks now, something everyone is surely ready to be done with.
On Saturday, more than 70,000 Arkansas fans got up early and streamed into Razorback Stadium to watch their favorite team take on Ole Miss. As the stump speech terminology goes, these were hard-working Americans spending their hard-earned money and limited time to try and get a distraction from everything else going on.
Instead, they were treated to an absolutely disastrous performance from the Hogs on a dreary November day. The Razorback Marching Band put on a military tribute show at halftime that featured a solemn rendition of taps, and longtime Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Wally Hall called it an “omen” for the beatdown.
The Razorbacks gave up 694 total yards and 63 points to an Ole Miss team missing its best offensive player in wide receiver Tre Harris. That’s right – Jordan Watkins, the guy the Hogs allowed to rack up 254 yards and five touchdowns, wasn’t even the Rebels’ best wideout. That’s the most receiving yards and touchdowns Arkansas has ever allowed to a single player in a game.
You can only imagine what they would have done with a healthy Harris.
Unfortunately, this was simply more of the same in what has become the standard billing home performance for Arkansas.
Arkansas’ Home Woes are Officially Back
Last season, the Hogs’ four marquee home games went as follows – a deflating loss to BYU, a miserable 7-3 defeat against Mississippi State, and blowout losses against Auburn and Missouri to cap off the season. Back in 2022, they lost a home game to Liberty and laid an egg – albeit in a win – against an FCS school in Missouri State, courtesy of then-head coach Bobby Petrino.
After an ugly win over a bad UAB team, you might have thought they had bucked that troubling trend after upsetting No. 4 Tennessee in the first home SEC game of 2024, but the status quo has been back in full force the last two weeks. A 34-10 loss against LSU where the Tigers ran away with it in the second half, and then a 63-31 drubbing where Ole Miss was on the throttle from start to finish.
Chuck Barrett, the play-by-play radio voice of the Razorbacks, sat down with Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman for a postgame interview to go over the miserable game. And what did Barrett have to say?
“It was just one of those days where the other team played really well.”
It’s hard to put an eye roll in writing, but that’s a very generous sugarcoating of Saturday’s events. Let’s be clear – it is not normal to get beat like that at home, and any effort to write it off that way should be shut down immediately.
It’s not like Arkansas was playing Alabama or Georgia. This is an Ole Miss team that lost to a miserable Kentucky team at home and, again, was missing its best offensive weapon. And yet, the Hogs made the Rebels look like an offensive juggernaut. They were only averaging 24 points per game in conference play entering the day, but they cut through Arkansas like a hot knife through butter.
Pittman took the podium after the game to offer his best explanation on what happened, and revealed his locker room message to the players.
“I just told them we got out-played, out-coached and out-physicaled.”
Not quite an inspiring rallying cry. He caught a lot of flak last season for his repeated use of the phrase “things of that nature,” but the “out-physicaled” remark is approaching the same status.
In Pittman’s defense, he’s never been a gifted orator or a master of “coach-speak,” and there’s really not a good way to navigate a postgame press conference after losing like that – but fans expect a little more from their head coach after a crushing loss.
The fanbase dogpiled on Pittman after November’s blowouts last season, and that will certainly happen again with remarks like that. And still, that wasn’t even the most troubling Pittman quote of the weekend.
Out-Physicaled Shouldn’t Be an Excuse Anymore
Arkansas fans were taken aback on the ESPN broadcast when commentator Mark Jones seemingly blasted the Hogs’ linemen, calling them a Walmart line compared to Ole Miss’ Louis Vuitton line. That might seem uncalled for at first glance, but it turns out those weren’t Jones’ words – they were Pittman’s.
In the context of complaining about not having enough NIL funding to compete with elite SEC programs, Pittman likened his linemen to the K-Mart clearance aisle, calling them the “blue light special” compared to the Rebels’ Louis Vuitton unit.
Razorback fans are all about working-class messaging, and that’s likely what Pittman was trying to do, but it’s hard to read that as anything other than putting your own players down.
Those comments are especially surprising considering all the effort that went into overhauling the offensive line in the offseason, bringing in marquee transfers like Addison Nichols, Fernando Carmona and Keyshawn Blackstock and replacing o-line coach Cody Kennedy with Eric Mateos. The new-look unit has garnered consistent praise from Pittman, both before and during the season.
“We needed that help on the o-line,” Pittman said in July. “I think we’ve addressed that problem and I think we’re going to see a significant difference.”
More recently, he said the “whole offensive line has played extremely well” after the win over Mississippi State. For him to change direction and put down the quality of his players after spending so long praising them is a head-scratcher, to say the least.
There’s also the very simple fact that Arkansas is in Year 5 under the leadership of a longtime offensive line coach. The time for being “out-physicaled” is long gone.
The most obvious example of the Hogs losing the muscle battle against Ole Miss is the eight sacks and 13 tackles for loss they allowed the Rebels’ defense to rack up. Quarterback Taylen Green took a beating the entire first half, eventually getting injured and having to be replaced by backup Malachi Singleton. One of those was a strip sack that resulted in the Rebels’ first touchdown of the game.
Arkansas also struggled to get any push in the run game, averaging just 3.4 yards per carry for a total of 127 yards – and those numbers are boosted by outlier carries of 42 yards by Singleton and 23 by running back Rashod Dubinion. Without those two bursts, those numbers drop to just 62 yards and a paltry 1.77 yards per carry.
Sure, Arkansas was missing Ja’Quinden Jackson and Braylen Russell was clearly hampered by an injury – and those are its two best and most physical runners – but Dubinion is a talented back who’s perfectly capable of hitting holes if they’re opened. The line was unable to generate any push all day, whether it was run blocking or pass protection.
In addition to his criticism of Arkansas’ “Jimmy’s and Joe’s,” Pittman also had interesting things to say about the Hogs’ X’s and O’s.
Pittman’s Comments Don’t Match Up
The biggest issue in the game by far was Arkansas’ inability to defend Ole Miss’ passing game. Quarterback Jaxson Dart threw for 515 yards and six touchdowns, five of those to Watkins. The aerial assault resulted in both Ole Miss studs being named SEC Co-Offensive Players of the Week, a rare dual honor for two teammates.
It was clear the Rebels were having fun with the Hogs, and Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin was making sure to let Pittman know who was in control with multiple gimmicks throughout the game.
325-pound defensive lineman JJ Pegues came in multiple times, taking a direct snap at one point and even scoring a rushing touchdown. When the Hogs finally did force a stop in the second half, Kiffin sent the offense out on fourth-and-long just to mess with Pittman, taking a delay of game penalty for fun and then punting the ball.
“We couldn’t cover them,” Pittman said postgame. “Never did really have much good going on defensively, and therefore we could never really get back in the game and catch up because we just had a hard time stopping them.”
Pittman again pointed to physicality in the secondary as an issue.
“Most of the problems we had were physical, which you can fix a lot better than mental ones,” he said. “Mental ones you’ve worked on all week, and you should be able to get the assignment, which I felt like we did. It was just physically we got dominated at times.”
The Head Hog again suggested a physicality and talent gap between the two teams, but when you break down the film, it’s certainly hard to place all the blame on the players.
Watkins’ five touchdowns were a result of the following:
- One-on-one man coverage, beats Marquise Robinson on a go route.
- One-on-one man coverage again, beats Jayden Johnson on a go route.
- One-on-one man coverage in the red zone, beats Robinson on a fade route.
- Soft zone coverage, wide open over the middle.
- One-on-one man coverage again, beats Hudson Clark on a go route.
If that sounded like a broken clock, that’s because it was the same thing over and over again – your eyes did not deceive you. Three of the touchdowns were identical deep balls, solo man coverage with no safety help, leaving Watkins wide open.
It’s clear the Hogs are sorely missing their top cornerback, Jaylon Braxton, but at a certain point the personnel issues start to become scheme issues when you’re repeating the same packages that have been getting burnt all day.
After all, Braxton was also missing for the Tennessee game when almost the same group of players held Nico Iamaleava to just 156 passing yards. So the players are clearly capable of executing a good gameplan.
Defensive coordinator Travis Williams called a world of a game against Tennessee, holding the Vols to just 14 points. But he’s also not immune from criticism. The reality is that on the season, the Razorbacks are second-to-last in the SEC in total defense, allowing 387.4 yards per game. In passing defense, they are dead last at 266.2 yards per game.
If an Ole Miss team without its No. 1 wideout sliced up Arkansas like that, there’s no telling what Quinn Ewers and the No. 5 Texas Longhorns will do to the Hogs’ secondary.
Election Day Illustrates What’s at Stake for Arkansas
After this dissection and more context painting a fuller picture, Barrett’s comments about it being “just one of those days” are even more frustrating for Hog fans. One of the core tenets of sports is that you always want to defend your home turf – for the sake of your supporters and your own personal pride.
When that doesn’t happen, it’s a shot to the heart. It’s not like fans are even expecting victories over teams like LSU – but you at least have to turn in a respectable performance for the fans who spent their time and money to come to the game. Otherwise, they’ll simply stop showing up.
With Election Day in full swing, everybody’s focus has been on the economy and how their wallet is looking – especially in a place like Arkansas, which is among the five poorest states in the country.
Folks in Fayetteville are loyal, diehard Razorback fans – but they’re also not made of money. As of Monday night, the cheapest ticket for the Texas game on Seatgeek is $77, and that’s before all the exorbitant fees those websites charge.
Arkansans want so badly to support a team that fights hard and wins – that much was clear from the raucous atmosphere at the Tennessee game. But what they can’t do is spend hundreds of dollars to bring their family to a game that’s all but over midway through the second quarter. That’s just the harsh truth, and Pittman knows it, too.
“The bottom line is we have three games left that we can get to a good bowl game, and we need to do that,” the Head Hog said. “The university deserves it, and so do the kids and the state.”
There’s no denying that this year’s Razorback team is miles better than the last rendition. But they’re also showing troubling signs of regression in the second half of the season, with flashbacks to last season’s home woes that everybody was so desperate to forget about.
Heading into the bye week, the team will look to get its physicality and mentality back up to par heading into a crucial final stretch of the season. How the Hogs play the rest of November could mean the difference between spending the holidays in Birmingham, Ala., or ringing in the New Year at a nice bowl game in Florida.
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DJ Williams breaks down Arkansas football’s crushing loss to Ole Miss:
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John Nabors chimes in on another home blowout for Arkansas football:
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