They say hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. It’s your favorite junior-high coach’s favorite phrase. The assertion is that players have to give it their best to maximize the chances for winning. But the phrase is overlooking one important thing.
What if the coaches fail to give them a chance to work hard?
The 2024 Arkansas football team doesn’t have a whole heck of a lot of talent. What little it does has, in fact, been maximized most of the season. And the hard work, as it were, they put in Saturday against the Tigers should have been enough to finally again beat a Missouri football program that has their number. Instead, the men with headsets failed a team that needs every extra advantage it can get.
The Tigers beat Arkansas on Saturday for the ninth time in 11 games since joining the SEC, 28-21. In some ways, it’s unfair to lay blame at the coaches. For starters, the snowy, frigid conditions were pretty awful. Predictably, sub-freezing temperatures and frozen water combined to wreck havoc on the ball security front: Taylen Green and Ja’Quinden Jackson fumbled inside Razorbacks territory, leading to Missouri football touchdowns.
All that wasn’t on the men making six- and seven-figures. Despite those miscues – which were massive – Arkansas still had a chance in the final quarter, except for the choices by the superiors.
Defensive coordinator Travis Williams made them defensively. His counterpart Bobby Petrino made them offensively. Sam Pittman made them because he didn’t force Williams’ or Petrino’s hand.
Travis Williams and Sam Pittman messed this up
In a tie game with 2:34 left, Missouri was on the Arkansas 40 with a 2nd-and-5. The Tigers weren’t close enough, really, to force the Razorbacks’ hand. Still, Williams, called a timeout on Pittman’s orders. Missouri gained 10 yards on a pass play, anyway. The coaches inexplicably signaled another timeout after that play.
The goal coming out of a timeout is to set up a play or a defensive posture. Everyone should be focused. But whatever called ended in chaos. Brady Cook ran a keeper 30 yards up the gut, untouched while the Razorbacks defenders looked completely lost, as though they anticipated literally anything else.
“I called timeout when Missouri had the football and was trying to use the two-minute as well on that. I didn’t want them to run a touchdown down the middle,” Pittman said after the game.
So much for that.
Bobby Petrino and Sam Pittman messed this up
The best part? It left the Hogs one timeout with 1:47 remaining to go 73 yards in hopes of tying the game and sending it to overtime. John Elway Taylen Green ain’t (to be fair, few are). With Petrino, the offensive coordinator, in his ear thanks to the new communication devices instituted in college football this season, Green tried to give his best impression. He completed four straight passes, including on a 4th-and-12, to get Arkansas to the Mizzou 43.
Green, though, was always bound to revert. His next pass was nearly picked and practically hit a Missouri defender in the back before falling incomplete. On 3rd-and-10, he found Andrew Armstrong for 25 yards to the Missouri 32 with 25 seconds left.
The next three passes all fell incomplete and the timeout sat unused as the final seconds ticked away.
Pittman asked Petrino, a former head coach, if he wanted to use the last timeout before the final play. Petrino told his boss he had his play: an awkwardly thrown Hail Mary by the SEC’s 12th-best quarterback.
“Yeah you hate to go home with one but I didn’t really feel like there was another time I could use one,” Pittman said.
Ain’t that about right.
Honestly, the whole final three minutes were a fitting end to an overachieving, but ultimately mediocre Arkansas football season. The Razorbacks will play in a bowl, exciting no one but the coaching staff and maybe the players who choose to stick around through December. Several will leave, looking for the next best thing. And Pittman will return, angering about five percent of the fan base, for 2025, a season that currently looks like a 4-8 campaign, assuming things go the Hogs’ way.
Arkansas Football: Perpetually Mid
The difference between 7-5 and 6-6 is just one game, obviously. The optics are completely different. Toss in how the Hogs lost and you just know Hogville is losing its mind, firing everyone from Pittman to Yurachek and telling the brass to pony up the dough to go get Gus Malzahn or, “Hell, get Eli Drinkwitz.”
The always-yelling message-board types will take a bowl game loss and proclaim the program has never been in worse shape, even though Arkansas may go into that contest without multiple starters. Treylon Burks, for instance, opted out of the postseason after a much more successful 2021 season in favor for prepping for the NFL. In that light, do you really think Landon Jackson is sticking around for the bowl? I don’t. If he doesn’t, more fuel for the fire (Pittman crowd).
Memphis likely awaits as the Hogs are expected to get a Liberty Bowl bid. Arkansas fans will complain about that, too. They hate the city of Memphis. And even if the Razorbacks win, little satisfaction will come from some would-be donors of the middle class, many of whom say they’re waiting on a coaching change before committing their cash to Arkansas’ NIL pot. That, in turn, will prolong the chicken-egg situation the program has found itself in for most of the last 14 years.
A win against Mizzou might not have changed all of that, but it sure would have helped. Now, it’s moaning-and-groaning season, even though the Razorbacks finished the year with the exact record it should have.
“Disappointed for our kids. I’m disappointed for the fans,” Pittman said. “Not disappointed in the effort, but in the execution with the two turnovers that led to two scores, and they had zero. It’s hard to beat a top-25 team that way.”
Hard work, talent, whatever. The coaches own this one.
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