From leading the nation in fumbles, to head-scratching special teams gaffes and failing to finish the job vs Missouri, Texas A&M and Oklahoma State, there was plenty to be frustrated about in the 2024 regular season for the Arkansas football program.
But one of the most nettlesome “what-ifs” of the fall came in the form of the would-be leader of the Arkansas secondary, Jaylon Braxton.
The cornerback, who appeared to be on the cusp of stardom after a standout freshman season in 2023, was expected to lead a Hogs defensive backfield that started off the 2024 season strong but faded some down the stretch in blowout losses to Ole Miss and LSU, as well as critical letdowns at the end of the Missouri loss.
Braxton suffered a knee injury in the second game vs Oklahoma State and never played again, despite reports he was at times rounding the corner on a return. His entry into the transfer portal last week was seen as a foregone conclusion among some in Arkansas football circles. Many assumed that he would have recovered well enough after what developed into tendinitis to have played in at least a couple more games, and so when that didn’t happen, some assumed he already had a foot out the door anyway.
The fact he’s now visiting three schools in Texas A&M, Ole Miss and Missouri with better recent track records – and assumed higher NIL budgets – doesn’t exactly help this portrayal.
While Braxton has only visited Ole Miss so far, he said on Thursday he loved “everything” about the visit. “I experienced the culture. The football culture that they have in the building, I can definitely see why the program is so successful,” he told Inside the Rebels. In another part, he added: “All the coaches there are really football guys…They are really genuine about everything.”
Funny, that word “genuine.”
Jaylon Braxton and Prompting Toward Transfer Portal?
Consider, after all, quite a few in Arkansas circles think Braxton was using the never-ending recovery from his Week 2 injury as a smokescreen to preserve his eligibility for another season while preventing any more injuries that could diminish his market value.
If that was the case, then not having Arkansas’ best defensive back on the field could have cost the Hogs at least a game during the course of the season. Winning at least seven games would have been a big deal in changing the impression of how the year went.
Instead, 22 scholarship players are on their way out. Razorback broadcaster Chuck Barrett sees the transfer portal as gutting not just some teams’ chances of fielding a competitive squad in bowl games, but sometimes as wreaking havoc on rosters months before it even opens in December.
“The thing that I don’t like about the portal in December is not the fact that it ruins necessarily the bowl games. It’s the fact that, whether you realize it or not, it ruins your season because these guys are talking to these [agents] in September and October,” Barrett said on Thursday’s episode of the “Chuck & Bo Show.”
“After the first loss, it’s a feeding frenzy. Why do you think some of these other guys aren’t playing anymore after that? After the Oklahoma State game, all of a sudden Braxton’s not playing all. Why do you think that was? Because they knew they were leaving. Somebody had either gotten to them – or they’d made the decision, or their dads had made it for them.”
Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman has also seen the corrosive effect an unscrupulous inner circle can have on a player during the course of the season.
“I think it’s more agents and [insiders] getting in these kids’ ears and going, ‘OK, if you don’t play, I can get you X amount of dollars, and if you do and you only have one year left, I can get you a lower amount of money,'” he said on Thursday, speaking broadly.
“I think there’s a lot of that going on.”
Jaylon Braxton’s Ex-Agent Has Something to Share
It’s easy to assume that NIL agents are nefarious actors in so much of this upheaval around college football, but JR Carroll would push back against the notion.
Carroll, an Arkansas-based lawyer who has represented many current and former Razorbacks over the decades, represented Jaylon Braxton this season (he said he stopped representing him after Braxton entered the portal).
Carroll says at no point did he advise Braxton to sit out for any reason outside of medical reasons, adding that while Braxton’s issue started as tendinitis it developed into something worse without divulging further details. Plus, he added, Braxton has been dating Scotty Thurman’s daughter Romani Thurman (a Razorback volleyball player) and so had extra incentive to stay around the area.
If there was anybody in Braxton’s ear, “it was not me,” he added. “I don’t know if he was talking to someone else… [clients] talk to lots of people.”
As far as when Braxton will decide on his next school, he told Inside the Rebels it will be early next week.
If it ends up being Ole Miss, he would join former Razorback Chris Paul Jr. and potentially others such as Patrick Kutas, Nico Davillier and Luke Hasz.
Sam Pittman admits that it’s very aggravating for Arkansas football fans to see so many talented players leave and, on top of that, likely join rival SEC programs. “I get that it’s frustrating. But what we decided to do was save a huge pool of money to go into the portal.”
Essentially, as he laid out in his Thursday press conference, Arkansas would have hurt itself by paying to keep too many of the players who ultimately entered the transfer portal.
“We wouldn’t have had the money left to go out and get what we might consider big-time difference makers had we just said ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes”” to the guys who wanted bumps in NIL pay. “And if we’d said that to every one of them, as much money as we have, we would have ran out.”
The silver lining, in Braxton’s situation, is that he was near the top in NIL pay for 2024 as far as Arkansas football players went. That money will go off the books, and can be allocated to other guys who (theoretically) will actually play. So, while the talent replacing Braxton may not be as good, as long as the replacement(s) actually show up in plenty of the games, Arkansas should stand to be better off in 2025 than 2024.
In this one case, anyway.
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More from Chuck Barrett on Braxton and the transfer portal at the 2 hour, 41-minute mark below:
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More on Jaylon Braxton and Arkansas football from BoAS:
