There are few things which should scare Sam Pittman entering his fifth season as the Arkansas football head coach.
In a way, having this job at all is like playing with house money. For decades, Pittman excelled as a position coach and didn’t seem especially eager to become the head man. When the University of Arkansas needed him, though, the now 62-year-old answered the call.
On top of that, Pittman appears to be playing with even more house money by getting to coach this 2024 season after the awful way things fell apart down the stretch of the 2023 campaign, losing to Auburn and Missouri by a combined score of 96-24.
So maybe it seems like he’s in a kind of double bonus and even if he ends up fired or walking after this season, it’s all good.
When it seems you have nothing to lose, what’s to fear?
Well, in Pittman’s case, there’s legacy and lasting impressions. Were those awful Auburn and Missouri losses in 2023 outliers to a Pittman era that was otherwise largely defined by effort, grit, hustle and all the stuff Bumper Pool, Grant Morgan and Good KJ stood for?
Arkansas Football Out of the Games
That answer can’t be provided until we see how the how Arkansas football does in the first four games of this season. That first outing, in Little Rock vs UAPB, will be a Hogs win. It’s all but guaranteed.
Arkansas will then hit the road twice over the course of three weeks: first, at Oklahoma State on Sept. 7; then, a trip to Auburn for a Sept. 21 tilt.
The one thing that Sam Pittman should fear heading into this season is that his Razorbacks bring the same kind of sluggish, underwhelming efforts to those litmus tests that made them look like a JV squad compared to Auburn and Missouri last year.
The Auburn football program, meanwhile, gets the luxury of starting out it season with five straight home games. Its SEC opener will be against Arkansas after it beats Alabama A&M in the season opener and then likely handles California and New Mexico in weeks two and three.
What Scares Hugh Freeze
Hugh Freeze wants to make sure his Tigers are fully healthy for the start of a hellish stretch run that begins with Arkansas or the following opponent, Oklahoma, depending on how you see it – and then continues with road games at Georgia and Missouri, two likely Top 10 teams. While Freeze and his Auburn football staff try to to strike the right balance between caution and physicality in practice, he’s afraid of losing some of his hosses anyway.
“We had two days in a row where some really scary things, when you watch the film, that easily could have hurt somebody,” Freeze said on Friday.
“Whether it’s an inside run and [the] defensive line runs a twist and everyone gets tangled up and now there’s five guys on the ground on top of each other — a running back going through the hole and that happens and it’s that far from hitting the bottom of his leg or his ankle somewhere.”
He added that he’s worried about defensive backs getting on the backs of Auburn receivers, including incoming 5-star freshman Cam Coleman, as they trail them.
The rub, of course, is that coaches want to see that dog in their players. Tamping down the intensity too much in fall camp might prevent injuries, but can open the door to other issues down the line.
“I just don’t know that you can win in this league without having some physical practices in camp,” Freeze added. “And it scares me to death, truthfully, because we need to stay healthy.”
Sam Pittman hasn’t quite phrased this dramatically in Arkansas’ fall camp, but all indications point to him thinking in a similar manner.
Just a day ago, Pittman said 15 players missed a team scrimmage with primarily short-term injuries. “I think if we forced half of that group to play today, I think they could have,” Pittman said. “We were trying to get better today, and we felt like as a staff that it would be better to hold these kids and get them back healthy because we still have another scrimmage and some other live reps going on.”
The Razorbacks are facing a myriad of issues, including Tyrone Broden with turf toe and hamstring injuries for Andrew Armstrong and Jaheim Singletary. The most serious appears to belong to guard Patrick Kutas, the offensive lineman who’s been out since last Friday with a back issue.
While Pittman did point out none of the injuries are serious, Arkansas can hardly afford an injury to a projected starter at a position where it has little relative depth and struggled so much last year (without new transfers Keyshawn Blackstock, Addison Nichols and Fernando Carmona Jr.).
Questions for Auburn Football
For Auburn, the big question comes from the other side of the line. There are a lot of new faces on the Tigers’ line and little proven production in the SEC. This time last year, buck linebacker Jalen McLeod was nursing an ankle injury and didn’t round into shape until late in the season when he racked up a season-high in tackles vs Arkansas.
“I want to see him stay healthy and I want to see him kind of complement Keldric Faulk as those bookend rushers,” Zac Blackerby said on the “Locked on Auburn” podcast. “I think they brought in Keyron Crawford, who certainly looks the part from Arkansas State to be that other ‘Buck’ linebacker. I think both of those guys can be really effective coming off the edge.”
In theory, coaches want to play the long game for a season to make sure they’re healthy in the home stretch come late October and November. Also, in theory, players play hard to the bitter end even if they are essentially out of bowl contention.
The reality, however, is often different. Especially in modern college football, when some percentage of players on a losing team are going to look around for their next destination as things go off the rails. Sometimes, like in the case of ex-Razorback Taurean Carter, they’ll even cop to in-season portal glancing.
So, in this case, it becomes even more important to win enough early-season games to prevent such a late-season swoon. When Pittman’s 2020 team beat Ole Miss and Mississippi State early on, that helped set the tone for a successful season despite later losses. The same applied to the 2021 squad beating Texas and then Texas A&M.
The 2022 team’s 3-0 start didn’t prevent a torrent of defeats at the end of the regular season, but at least Arkansas stayed competitive in those last three losses and did get one blow-out of No. 14 Ole Miss in.
Auburn isn’t going to have a problem front-loading its wins this fall. If it ends up with four straight out of the gate thanks to Arkansas, and the Hogs didn’t already beat Oklahoma State, that’s going to be very scary scenario indeed for Sam Pittman.
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Auburn Finishing with 9 Wins?
Expect Taylen Green and Payton Thorpe, Auburn’s senior quarterback, to battle it out for perceived placement in the upper half of the SEC quarterbacks.
“I think Payton Thorne will be significantly better than a year ago,” Zac Blackerby says in the below video. “I think he’s going to be a top half quarterback in the conference, statistically. Maybe not from an ability standpoint, but as far as production, which is all that matters this season, I think he’s going to get to that point.”
“When it comes to completion percentage, and total offensive yards and offensive yards per game and production, I think he’s going to be able to be a top eight SEC quarterback. And if that’s the case, and this defense does anything close to what it did a year ago, you’ve got a real shot at 8 and 4 or 9 and 3.”
Aside from the more important team-wide consequences, losing at Arkansas would certainly help Green’s case to be considered a better-than-average SEC quarterback.
More on Auburn football, including a look-ahead to the Arkansas game, starting at 17:30
