Two days into the start of another football season at Arkansas, the questions are coming fast and furious about what fans should be expecting this season.
Pump the brakes on that, dude.
It’s really too early to even be wondering what we should be asking about and no evaluations made now are binding beyond the next practice. Even for coaches.
While a lot of folks like to strut around giving their opinion — regardless whether anybody asked or not — the fact of the matter is nobody knows anything right now except the Razorbacks have managed to find their way from the dressing room to the practice field.
Don’t expect a lot from the brief time anybody gets to watch practice. For some reason, Chad Morris likes to keep a somewhat tight rein on anybody finding out that quarterbacks hand off and throw the ball.
Through two practices, we’ve been asked not to film field goals in one and punts in the other. I have no idea, so don’t even ask.
In the first 20 minutes of practice (which consists of four five-minute periods), we see the same basic formula we’ve seen since spring practice in 2018 … in almost exactly the same order.
None of that’s a complaint. It is what it is and nobody asked before making that decision. It’s kind of a strange way to build enthusiasm around a new program, but whatever. For those that don’t know, NFL locker rooms are required to be open every day during a set time and coaches required to stand in front of the media. There are some that would never be heard from if there wasn’t a requirement.
All of that is just a prelude to tell you we don’t see enough to make a lot of judgements.
Quite frankly, the coaches may like what they see after two practices, but they aren’t going to make a lot of decisions based on that.
For example, the working theory at quarterback is graduate transfer Ben Hicks will start the first couple of regular season games, then give way to another grad transfer, Nick Starkel, who will take over and be the caretaker for KJ Jefferson, who will take over next season.
If you watch the workouts in shorts, you have to wonder why Starkel would be behind. The ball literally jumps off his arm on passes. It gets to the receivers on some routes we’ve seen a full one-two steps ahead of what we saw last year.
By Starkel’s own admission on Razorback Media Day on Saturday, we found out he’s just a hair under 6-foot-5, which is something I’ve suspected since 2017 standing next to him at AT&T Stadium in Arlington. He’s listed at 6-3 and I’ve wondered if he slouched or the measuring tape slipped.
Jefferson looks like he could walk on the field right now and take things over.
But that’s without pads. That’s without a defense coming at him with the general goal of rendering him null and void as many times as possible.
At this point, we don’t even know what to be questioning other than the same routine queries about who’s doing what at this position or that position.
About the only thing we know at this point is the team, as a whole, looks completely different this year.
Physically, they are bigger, faster and look far more confident than even the last couple of seasons. Even some of the returning players that were recruited before Morris got here have changed their bodies and their body language is different this year.
Whether that means a thing or not probably won’t be known until they start playing games.
Shoot, we may not even know until the end of September.
Of course we won’t know if we should know that until October.
