Coaches are fond of saying that if a team isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse. A similar maxim is true in sports media: if you’re not looking forward, you’re looking backward.
Arkansas football’s win over Texas Tech on Friday night in the Liberty Bowl lifted the Razorbacks to 7-6 season, their third winning season in coach Sam Pittman’s five years. It was also Pittman’s third bowl win in three games, too. But the last time Arkansas had a coach who went 7-6 in two out of three years, the season after the last such run was ruinous. Bret Bielema saw his star fall fast in light of a Belk Bowl collapse in 2015 and 4-8 record in 2016, a season in which he was fired while walking off the field following a loss to Missouri.
Pittman, who was Bielema’s offensive line coach for the early years of the latter’s tenure at Arkansas, very well could be staring in the face of such a season in 2025. If it were to happen – and the odds are stronger for 4-8 than 8-4 right now – did Pittman just beat his successor?
The Once And Future King (of Arkansas Football)
Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire has stayed the course for the Red Raiders in three seasons and didn’t embarrass himself of his team during a game in which Tech was severely undermanned. In his first, they overachieved, last year they went under the bar and this year, Tech finished almost exactly where it was expected to in the Big 12. Another year of the same, combined with his affinity for the Natural State and the Hogs, could lead him to serious candidacy were the program to move on from Pittman.
“For me, the first football that I can remember is that Razorback,” McGuire said before the Liberty Bowl. “I do have a plastic Razorback hat at home. So really, that was my team growing up.”
He hasn’t said as much, but given that past, it’s hard to imagine he would decline calls for an open job in Fayetteville. Few coaches have ever been so effusive of another program in the press conferences leading up to a bowl game. The ESPN broadcast even went so far as to show the Texarkana, Texas native decked out in Hogs gear decades ago:
To be clear, I’m not of the belief that Arkansas should remove Pittman. This year’s team was better than it should have been given the dearth of talent compared to most of the rest of the SEC. But it’s also clear the Razorbacks have dozens of roster questions heading into the season 2025 and perhaps the most daunting schedule the program has ever had.
Looking Ahead to 2025
Only the team’s first two games – against Alabama A&M and Arkansas State – can be penciled in as wins. Memphis, coming off an 11-2 season, is a stiff challenge and Notre Dame will almost certainly be favored when the Fighting Irish visit Fayetteville in Week 5. Between those two stretches, the Hogs will head to Ole Miss against a Rebels team that it’s still itching to become one of FBS’ elite and is far closer than the Razorbacks to doing so.
Trips to Tennessee, Texas and LSU will result in Arkansas as an underdog. You can believe that beating the Vols at Knoxville will be all the harder after Tennessee’s loss at Arkansas this season cost them a first-round bye and forced them to travel to Ohio State and their demise in the playoffs.
In 2025, an Arkansas home game against Auburn is a toss-up. Texas A&M’s visit to Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium will see the Aggies favored, probably, and Mississippi State’s trip northwest should be a Hogs advantage. That leaves Missouri, a team Arkansas has beaten just once in the last nine years.
In other words, if you thought the yelling for Pittman’s proverbial head was loud this year, during an overachieving season, just you wait.
Fans Will Complain No Matter What
Arkansas was ahead by 17 points at the time. The complaints are never-ending, whether they’re fair, or in this case, not. The Razorbacks will finish the season in the top 15 in FBS in total offense and in the top half of FBS in total defense. The only team they lost to that they were better than was Oklahoma State and they beat a superior Tennessee to counter it, anyway. Toss in legitimate chances against Texas A&M, Missouri and, to a lesser extent, Texas, and it’s difficult to fathom where all the animosity comes from.
McGuire, or any new coach, would face no such hostility in his first season. Besides, McGuire is used to it. Texas Tech fans, apparently, give as good as Arkansas’.
Arkansas has tried its luck with former Texas High School Football coaches before. He Who Shall Not Be Named was fired before his second season was even finished. Pittman was hired the year after to pick up the pieces, something he’s done with aplomb, considering the absolute devastation with which he was left. Is the continued chaos of what college football has become and is becoming something with which Pittman wants to reckon? He’s bemoaned it several times before. No one would be surprised if the coach decided to hang ‘em up, so to speak, after next year, regardless of Arkansas’ pulling the trigger on the job.
Joey McGuire Puts In Work
McGuire, who is 10 years Pittman’s junior at age 53, seems plenty able to navigate the transfer portal. Entering Friday, Texas Tech’s incoming portal class was ranked No. 2 in the nation by 247Sports. What could McGuire do with SEC branding? Maybe it becomes moot. Maybe Pittman overachieves again. That wouldn’t be surprising, either.
But if you’re not looking forward, you’re looking backward.
“The only way it can be better is if Arkansas and Texas Tech are facing off in the playoffs,” McGuire had said. “That’s the only way this gets better for me.”
It might get better for McGuire than that, even, come December 2025.
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Trey Biddy Gets Grumpy?
Joye McGuire, like Sam Pittman, is a very much in that player’s coach mold. That’s seen a a few ways on McGuire’s side, such as how he allowed a few outgoing transfers to still practice with his team heading into the Liberty Bowl.
It’s also seen in how both Pittman and McGuire allow their players to express themselves in different kinds of celebrating. Nothing as over-the-top as what Lane Kiffin allows, mind you, but sometimes players let loose in the locker room, and sometimes that happens on the field.
Occasionally, this year it happened on the field when the game wasn’t yet in hand.
On that last point, Trey Biddy is ready to share a piece a mind:
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