Hogs won’t get ANY respect, but they will be better

As Steve Spurrier once said, it’s talking season in the SEC.

The official start for what I’ve always called the pre-mumbling part of that is the league’s spring meetings in Destin this week. For the media, it’s the greatest way to get your boss to pay for a week at the beach, but it’s going to be a lot of, well, nothing.

In mid-July we’ll have SEC Media Days in Atlanta this year for the second biggest media waste of time in my opinion. Since process servers quit hanging around the Wynfrey Hotel to serve Phillip Fulmer with court papers it’s gotten completely boring.

Oh, in the days when the league required coaches to hit radio row it was a little more entertaining, but now it’s interviewing the same people year in and year out, mostly involving media people interviewing other media people.

Also during the talking season will be predictions.

“Whadda ya’ think?” is media code for how you think the league will finish this season.

My answer since 1992 (and I think I’ve missed maybe five Media Days over that time, but hopefully that number will start to increase dramatically) has ALWAYS been Alabama in the West, Florida in the East.

Every single year. I don’t even bother to try and figure it out. I’ve been dead on the money nine times, over 34.6% of the time. Three times I hit half of it. That means nearly half the time my scientific method has hit one of the teams.

Preseason predictions are maybe fun for some people, but basically ridiculous. It’s like trying to predict the winner of an automobile race. You have no idea about all of the factors nobody can control.

In a sport where one injury can change most teams’ fortunes dramatically through 12 games, why even bother to figure it out? Just play the odds (which say Alabama and Florida statistically control) and enjoy yourself.

The other thing you can almost always count on is Arkansas getting little to no respect from either the media in the league or nationally.

Hey, don’t knock it. Embrace it, Hog fans.

You can look it up. When the Hogs are picked to do bad is when they do well. The biggest disappointments come when they are favored to win something and then fail to meet expectations that are usually unrealistic.

Since coming to the SEC, the only back-to-back big years were 2010-11 when Bobby Petrino’s last two teams had some great offensive playmakers and went 21-5, played in the Sugar Bowl and Cotton Bowl in consecutive years.

Now the national media and many across the league are once again simply spouting babble about the Razorbacks needing time to get going after a coaching change that involves a change in style, blah, blah, blah.

Some even think the Hogs will go winless in the SEC this year.

Let me go out on a limb here and say that won’t happen. Usually a huge cynic, I’m thinking right now Arkansas will win three to five games in the league this year.

That’s because last year’s team had a conditioning problem far more than a talent problem. There have also been whispers of internal issues within the team. Some players didn’t like some coaches and vice versa. It doesn’t matter now.

What I did see in the spring were players that were quicker than last year, particularly in the offensive line. In today’s world of college football where just about everybody does zone blocking instead of just trying to flatten folks, speed and quickness are as critical as just raw size.

At Arkansas, Chad Morris inherited a team of players that played his style of football in high school, then failed when trying to do something else when they got to college. Bret Bielema didn’t recruit players experienced in his preferred style because, well, nobody in the South plays that way anymore.

Maybe I’m overly optimistic. We’ll see.

No one seems to want to see this team returns a bunch of players that blew fourth-quarter leads late in three games (Texas A&M, Mississippi State and Missouri). Remember, Bielema kept talking about how close that team was.

He was right in one respect. They were losing games they were close to winning. Games they should have won.

Games I think they will win this season.

Morris’ biggest coaching job is within the team. There is a different attitude and a different culture already.

It’s genuine optimism.

What we heard in the spring and offseason has been a belief they are getting better instead of sounding like they’re trying to talk themselves into believing they are better.

And that is why they will be better than most think.