Mizzou among SEC Programs Trying to Horn In on Hogs’ Arrangement with Generous Alumni 

Like others who email athletic department staffers seemingly out of the blue, Slinkard was met with radio silence. For months. Eventually, he realized money was the universal language and he offered a proposition to then-Arkansas Edge head Chris Bauer.

“I was like, ‘I will donate $1,000 if you will run one of these initiatives,’” Slinkard said. “‘QR codes at basketball games or football games, T-shirts, any sort of marketing billboards. You can pick. … I’ll pay for $1,000 of them.’ We should be able to reach 100,000 people with the QR codes and if 10% of them donate $5 each, it more than pays off. … That’s how confident I was in it.”

Sure enough, Bauer reached out, though they couldn’t get anything quite going before Bauer left the program in July 2024. Still, the connection gave Slinkard the confidence to keep following up and, soon, offensive line coach Eric Mateos took notice.

What really started to speed up the process was when Arkansas’ NIL Strategy Director Davonte Higginbottom responded. During the fall, he told Slinkard the program was in the process of hiring an analytics guru and that Slinkard and Alexander’s stuff would probably fit in perfectly. Dylan Bernstein joined the Arkansas athletic department as the director of analytics and player valuation in November, becoming the third member of Remy Cofield’s front office staff.

Transfer Portal Analytics

It has evolved to the point that now the duo are in the midst of trying to help the front office navigate the transfer portal, which Ryan Silverfield is using to construct his first roster with the Razorbacks.

Slinkard and Alexander start with Pro Football Focus grades, but Joe Armchair Quarterback does that, too. What makes their models different is they incorporate multiple years of transfer player data alongside team context, opponent strength, role-usage patterns and historical comparables. With such a large set of numbers, they can identify statistically meaningful indicators of future performance at the Power Four level.

Slinkard cautioned that they only make recommendations and acknowledged they aren’t perfect. That’s not the goal. They just hope to come up with guardrails to minimize risk and maximize the probability of success.

“Even if you get a couple of them into the wrong category, you can get to a point where you’re layering into a high confidence level of being able to predict some of them,” Slinkard said. “There’s always outliers. There’s always flops, but it’s better than doing nothing.”

Question marks surrounded Andrew Armstrong, for example, but his metrics at Texas A&M-Commerce pointed to him being productive at Arkansas despite making the jump from the FCS ranks. On the flip side, however, Anton Juncaj met most of the benchmarks they look for in defensive ends, but was largely a flop for the Razorbacks.

Slinkard and Alexander aren’t sure how much the UA is utilizing their work, or if Silverfield or any of the coaches even know of their existence, but are thrilled the front office has at least been receptive to it.

Other schools are taking notice, too.

Staffers at Missouri and Georgia have asked about their services. Alexander, a Little Rock Catholic graduate, said that’s a hard “no.”

“I’m not just going to give my free labor, my assistance to Missouri or any other SEC team for that matter,” Alexander said.

The Missouri staffer even seemed to indicate they’d be willing to pay for their services. But nope. They have standards.

“Real nice guy,” Alexander said. “But no, I don’t want to help (the Tigers).”

For now, Slinkard leads a sales team and Alexander works as a financial controller for a construction company. The services they perform for Arkansas come for free.

The two friends have been impressed with Higginbottom and Bernstein. They just need time to settle into their roles in the UA’s front office, which didn’t exist until last year. Based on their interactions over the past couple of months, Slinkard and Alexander don’t think it’ll take long before they and their staff won’t need them anymore. But they’ll always have the now.

“If it gets to the point where they’re more capable than we are,” Slinkard said, “and I 100% believe they will be in the next couple months and they don’t need us anymore and they can do what we do faster, that’s where we might go out and monetize it for G5 teams or FCS (teams) and try to help them.

“But I will never help Arkansas competitors, SEC competitors.”

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Sign Of the Times

“Goldman Sachs” and “Arkansas football employees” aren’t two phrases that historically go together. That’s changing with Arkansas Quant’s primary point person:

Click to Reveal

More on Arkansas vs Missouri

The trainer of Darius Winston, Danny Beale and TJ Hodges among others has seen up and close and personal the differences in the ways Sam Pittman, Ryan Silverfield and Eli Drinkwitz address recruiting top talent in the state of Arkansas. More on that

and and more here:

Learn more about Arkansas Quant from our friends at the Coaches Pod:

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More coverage of Arkansas football and the transfer portal from BoAS…