Somehow, the hottest question of Arkansas football offseason so far comes on the heels of what at the time seemed like an insignificant event in the waning minutes of Arkansas’ 13-point win in the Liberty Bowl on Friday.
At the end of a play, video footage shows Carmona walking toward a pile of players and seemingly stepping on the ankle of a prone Texas Tech football player, C.J. Baskerville, before helping his teammate Braylon Russell to his feet. At the time, the officials did not intervene and Baskerville kept playing without missing even a snap.
Still, on replay it was a clearly bad look – one Baskerville himself made sure the world saw on Saturday with a post that’s generated about 5.5 million views so far. Baskerville accused Carmona of saying “Got your b**** a***” to him during the stomping and then proceeded to call the act “straight up dirty.”
This rang the bell on a feeding frenzy online, with multiple media personalities and NFL players chiming in, almost all of them against Carmona.
The worst of the bunch had to be former NFL player Kyle Long, who apparently flashed some signs of CTE with this recommendation:
Emmanuel Ocho called Carmona “trash” while staunch Razorback supporter Bobby Bones got into the terrible optics of this for the Arkansas football program. These condemnations just go on and on, with many college football fans wanting Carmona banned from ever playing an NCAA football again.
Obviously, that’s an overreaction.
Seeing the entire episode in the longer video clip, as you can below, indicates why the referees didn’t see it/make a big deal out of it in the first place:
On Sunday afternoon, Fernando Carmona gingerly took one step toward addressing this embarrassment:
“I’d like to apologize for my actions last Friday night in the Liberty Bowl,” Carmona wrote on “X.” “I let my emotions get away from me. I have nothing but respect for Texas Tech and the game of football. I apologize to my team and coaches. I’m not that kind of player and will learn from this.”
Good on the Las Vegas native for admitting he lost his cool and not making excuses. But this apology, in which Carmona doesn’t even go through the trouble of addressing Baskerville by name, is also pretty flimsy.
In order to close the loop on the issue, Carmona needs to contact Baskerville directly and apologize to him man to man, as our contributor Beau Wilcox points out. Hopefully, Baskerville will then change his tune publicly and the two will have provided an example to the rest of the sporting world on how to resolve an issue of sportsmanship on your own.
Otherwise, it will need to be up to Sam Pittman to make sure that the rest of the world knows just how serious Arkansas is about its image and doing what’s right by the spirit of the game and the competitors it respects. The best way to do this would be keep Carmona out of Arkansas’ 2025 season opener vs Alabama A&M. It doesn’t matter than this game is nine months away as opposed to two weeks from now. It’s the right thing to do regardless.
“By suspending Carmona for one game, Pittman makes a statement he takes this situation very seriously,” as our contributor Matthew Nichols puts it. “Pittman can also go on to describe how the conduct is unacceptable, how much Carmona regrets the split second decision in the heat of the moment, this is a learning opportunity for a quality young man and Pittman has placed Carmona on a zero tolerance policy moving forward for similar actions moving forward.”
“Pittman’s likeability will assist in quelling the furor. Additionally, every coach in the country will support Pittman, as every one of them have players who may need another chance after a bonehead decision. On or off the field.”
It’s easy to think that Fernando Carmona has done enough with his “X” message simply because he’s a Razorback, but he needs to take one more step to truly right the ship. Otherwise, Pittman needs to do it for him.
Sam Pittman Under Attack?
While Carmona is fending off attacks on his reputation, it appears that the Arkansas football coach may have to start doing the same.
On Sunday night, former Razorback Dwight McGlothern ignited a firestorm of his own when he hopped onto a Dazmin James appreciation thread and explained to the world how – as he saw it – Pittman benched him late in the 2023 season essentially out of spite.
McGlothern then accused Pittman of talking “behind my back” to NFL scouts and teammates. “I love the Razorbacks but I don’t respect a man who tell lies for fun,” he added, “then talk[s] down on you & scared to approach you when he know[s] he talk[s] bad about you behind your back.”
Dwight McGlothern, despite being one of the nation’s highest rated cornerbacks, went undrafted in the 2024 NFL Draft and has so far appeared in one game for the Vikings. This is a developing story, but it does open a few immediate questions such as the one that BoAS contributor Jim Harris posed on “X”: “Nudie, why would the training or medical staff not know you had a concussion and inform the head head? There’s an NCAA protocol for concussions and medical clearance to play.”
More on the above issue here:
More Big Questions for Arkansas Football
Matthew Nichols and Beau Wilcox recently dove into a Q&A for BoAS on some of the hottest questions facing the Arkansas football program heading into 2025. Here’s the first:
Q: What is your biggest complaint about Sam Pittman? Failure to retain talent, attract talent? Failure in preparing teams for games? Poor in game decision making?
Beau Wilcox: Pretty hard, in my book, to avoid this elephant in the room: he’s never been above .500 in SEC play. My expectations in December 2019 were higher than that, even in the context of an annually daunting conference schedule and in the wake of Chad Morris’ symphony of destruction.
I trace most of that to a coach whose reliance on staff, to borrow Matthew’s accurate phrasing, is too much at the wrong times. If he wins maybe one-third of the one-possession games that have bedeviled him, we are having a much different colloquy right now. And sadly, the reason the Tennessee win was so special is because it absolutely looked like nearly every other Pittman loss until it wasn’t one. Malachi Singleton and Braylon Russell rescued ‘em, sat most of the remaining games, and then…left.
So that gives you some sense of why I cannot be too enthused.
I give Pittman credit for being an advocate for his players, and I saw a much more passionate guy on the sidelines this fall. That is encouraging but he needs an eight- or nine-win 2025 to make people somewhat happy, and that will be a tall order yet again.
Matthew Nichols: “Complaint” may not be the right word, but it is clear to me Pittman is far more reliant on the rest of the staff than other coaches. Hire Dan Enos and the season is in the toilet. A complete mismatch of scheme to talent on hand. He seems to be an average-at-best-in-game coach. But with quality play callers on both sides of the ball this weakness can be sufficiently minimized.
I think Arkansas was lagging behind other teams at the beginning of the NIL-era. Was this on Pittman? To some degree. I suspect he would prefer to coach in the 80s, when players rarely transferred. The failure to close the deal with in-state talent bothers me. But maybe it shouldn’t. Pine Bluff native Courtney Crutchfield has come home to the Natural State. Eli Drinkwitz can shove that billboard straight up…
Q: Shouldn’t we be still grading the Pittboss on a curve considering how bad things had been in 2018 and 2019? Truly bouncing back from consecutive two-win seasons really isn’t done in a mere half decade, after all.
Beau Wilcox: I think we already have been. Five years is a pretty good measuring stick for what a coach’s long-term prognosis is. Pittman will never be anything but appreciated for taking this program out of the Morris dregs and making it respectable again. He’s never been anything but a zealous advocate for the program and I still think that means something. But he’s lagged behind Drinkwitz and Kiffin, who were more or less his comps as far as timing and location of hire. And I think that is what frustrates fans the most.
Matthew: As usual the guys (and super attractive girls) over at SEC Shorts summed up the state of Arkansas football very well with their It’s A Wonderful Life Sketch of pre-Pittman Arkansas Football. There were moments during the Chad Morris era many a Hog fan wished the University of Arkansas football program never existed.
Pittman’s record compares favorably to Brett Bielema, who inherited a program in much better shape. Both finished their fifth season with 29 wins, though Pittman has three fewer losses because of the shortened COVID season. Brett Bielema is now the coach of a top-25 Illinois team.
Is Bielema a top 25 coach now, but somehow forgot how to coach for the five years he was in the SEC? No. He is a pretty good coach who is in a very top heavy conference with a lot of teams Arkansas would love to play every year. Coaching Arkansas may be the hardest coaching job in the country, other than Mississippi State. Pittman also had to navigate a transition to a completely new era of college football.
Stayed tuned for more of this Q&A to publish soon.
More on Fernando Carmona and Arkansas football from BoAS:
