For the second time this season, a former Arkansas tight end has taken to a podcast to give his side of a midseason dismissal.
A few weeks after Ty Washington discussed the end of his time in Fayetteville on the 4th & 5 podcast with D.J. Williams, Var’keyes Gumms and his father joined the Wu Pig Podcast to do the same.
Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman announced both players’ departures on Oct. 28, which was the Monday following the Mississippi State win.
According to the timeline laid out by Gumms and his father Lavar, the former North Texas transfer was kicked off the team leading up to that game, which checks out with when he first appeared as “out” on the SEC’s official availability report that week.
The way they told it on the Wu Pig Podcast, Gumms was involved in a car accident a week earlier, leading up to the LSU game on October 19. It wasn’t until several days later that he said he first started experiencing some symptoms from the wreck.
They decided they wanted to see more doctors — and even still have an MRI scheduled — to make sure everything was okay, which Gumms claims he discussed with Pittman. That’s why both he and his father were “shocked” when he was kicked off the team.
“Basically I was released from the team because of athletic standards — as in not seeing the athletic trainers because I had wanted to get a second opinion on my injury that I had during the week and that was the car accident,” Gumms said.
A few times throughout the interview, Gumms described what Arkansas did as a “business decision” because of his lack of availability for the upcoming game.
His father also addressed rumors that attacked his son’s character, saying they weren’t true.
“This ain’t nothing going on with no drugs, this ain’t nothing going on with us quitting on the team,” Gumms’ father said. “This is something that was taking place that we’re still shocked about. We came here to Arkansas to play, we came here to get on the field and show forth our talents.”
While Best of Arkansas Sports has been told there was more to it, we can confirm the car accident aspect of Gumms’ story and that he wasn’t believed to be doing anything illegal. Of course, hearing the other side of the story is very unlikely because Pittman, understandably so, won’t address it publicly, so it’s worth taking such a “tell-all” with a grain of salt.
“I don’t have time to get into that,” Pittman said last week when asked if he had a response to Washington’s comments, which made the Arkansas football head man out to be less of the chummy player’s coach that’s his reputation in some circles. “He’s not on the team and we just hope he does good and we just move on.”
A similar question about Gumms would almost certainly elicit the same response.
Regardless, both father and son admitted there were “no hard feelings” toward the program later in the interview, but Lavar Gumms did question if his son got a fair opportunity.
“He was an All-American before he got here,” the elder Gumms said. “So my question is ‘Why do you keep having All-Americans in talents and four-stars come here and then yet you don’t see them?’”
Answering Mr. Gumms’ Question
Certainly, there have been a few head-scratching personnel decisions by Sam Pittman during his tenure at Arkansas. Unfortunately for Mr. Gumms, this doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Simply put, his son was buried on the depth chart at one of the Razorbacks’ deepest positions. (Also, he wasn’t exactly an “All-American” at North Texas. He was named a second-team Freshman All-American as a redshirt freshman in 2022 by The Athletic and the College Football Network.)
When healthy, Luke Hasz is a legitimate All-SEC tight end. Ty Washington proved last season, before getting hurt himself, that he was more than capable of producing in the SEC. Andreas Paaske and Maddox Lassiter bring a completely different skillset to the table as primarily blockers.
As Gumms’ father pointed out, there was a stretch in the first half of the season in which none of the tight ends were producing in the passing game. That was likely because of Hasz’s lingering back injury, but even while banged up, the sophomore was still getting a lot of reps and playing well as a blocker.
That’s an aspect of Gumms’ game in which it appears he trails his teammates. While he showed flashes of being an excellent pass catcher, he hadn’t shown he could hold up against SEC defenders in the run game.
In fact, Pro Football Focus gives him a 52.2 run-blocking grade on 38 run-blocking snaps. That is well below Hasz’s 65.9 mark and even lower than Paaske’s 60.2 grade on more than twice as many reps.
To be fair, Gumms had a higher run-blocking grade than Washington (46.8), but the latter had a 70-plus pass-blocking grade over the last two seasons and, it bears repeating, was a more proven commodity given his playing time last season.
“There was no separation to where you couldn’t find no other player to get on the field to do the same thing anybody else was starting doing,” Gumms’ father said. “I think that other people deserve an opportunity, especially if they’re going to practice all throughout the week. I think they need to be rewarded at some point.”
Also, it’s worth noting that Var’keyes Gumms himself admitted he wanted to improve on the mental side of the game, which is extremely important in a Bobby Petrino offense.
“Some aspects of the game that I’m focused on improving is just reading the defense, just getting that pre-snap on what the defense is going to do,” Gumms said. “I feel like that’ll make me play faster.”
Another thing that must be addressed is that at one point during the interview, Lavar Gumms mentioned there had been talk of his son getting a medical redshirt.
The co-hosts of the podcast brought up how Pittman was willing to work with left guard Patrick Kutas and his desire to redshirt after missing the first half of the season with a back injury and insinuated the fifth-year coach didn’t care about burning Gumms’ redshirt because he may transfer.
However, Gumms – who already took a regular redshirt at North Texas – was no longer eligible to redshirt. He had already appeared in five games prior to his car accident, which exceeds the limit to receive a medical redshirt. Hasz experienced something similar last season, as he suffered his season-ending shoulder injury on the first series of game No. 5.
Love for Arkansas
Despite how everything played out, Var’keyes Gumms still spoke highly of his time at Arkansas.
Even though he briefly decommitted before officially signing, the Houston native said he always had his mind set on playing for the Razorbacks the first time he went into the transfer portal.
“It was like everybody convinced me to go to a different school: ‘Don’t come to Arkansas, it’s no good’” Gumms recalled. “I was like, nah. Nobody could tell me that I wasn’t going to Arkansas. I had my mind made up that I was going to Arkansas. It was no NIL deal you could give me, it was no more money you could give me.”
He also still talks to quite a few of his old teammates. He said he encourages them and wants them to succeed, and even added that Sam Pittman is “a cool dude outside of football.”
While he waits for the portal to open up on Dec. 9, Gumms said he’s focusing on his grades and has the goal of ending the semester with at least a 3.0 GPA. He’s open to all offers and said he wants to go somewhere he can showcase his talents.
Regardless of the reason, that never happened at Arkansas. Still, Gumms hardly thinks his two years in Fayetteville have been wasted.
“I learned teamwork, I learned discipline, I learned communication, I learned leadership, I learned time management, I learned problem solving,” Gumms said. “I even learned the business side of just college football. So it’s a lot of stuff that I learned being here at Arkansas even though it didn’t go how I planned it to go.”
Here’s to hoping that this whole situation was just another learning opportunity.
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Watch the full interview with Var’keyes Gumms and his father here:
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More coverage of Arkansas football from BoAS…
The Story of Ty Washington’s Exit
Washington refused to go into the game during garbage time vs Mississippi State and paid the price.
Washington knew his refusal wouldn’t go down well, he didn’t expect what happened the next day when he got a text from his position coach, Morgan Turner, telling him to go meet Pittman just 37 minutes later. As he walked to Pittman’s office after a coaches meeting, “I knew something was off kind of just because the way the coaches was walking past me, they had to walk past me to get to their offices and some of them didn’t want to say anything to me.”
“Some of them just had their head down walking and it was just weird, kind of weird feeling.”
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