Chad Morris can be forgiven for wanting to put this past weekend behind him.
He said at his press conference Monday he’s been here before, but the events over the weekend might challenge that and we’re not even talking about the 52-6 embarrassment down in Starkville.
He even had a player, redshirt freshman Jordon Curtis, walk out of the football center Sunday night and get hit by a car.
Curtis was treated and released at a local hospital and will be okay. Probably faster than the current state of the Hogs’ football program.
Yeah, it was a bad weekend. Morris isn’t saying where it stacks up in bad weekends for him, though.
With Arkansas sitting at 2-9 for the season and facing the most losses in a single season in school history, some are putting the blame squarely on Morris, which he probably will publicly accept.
But he didn’t create the mess he’s got.
To be fair, Bret Bielema didn’t think he was leaving a mess this big. In a coaching changeover, these things can go several ways for a variety of reasons.
When you look at Arkansas’ situation now, a lack of high-level recruiting across the board combined with almost zero development at some critical positions plus a lack of discipline from within combined to make this, well, a program in sole possession of the basement in the SEC.
Try and spin it however you want, that’s the realities of the situation.
Now Morris has to fix it.
It started Monday with the suspensions of safety Kamren Curl and cornerback Ryan Pulley for the much-discussed episode at Mississippi State (and I didn’t see it).
“They will not be here today or yesterday or any part of this week for actions that are completely unacceptable with what we’re about,” Morris said.
Defensive coordinator John Chavis talked about how it looked.
“The perception was not very good and it had to be addressed and our head coach has handled that. I’m with him 100 percent,” he said.
Some will agree … others won’t. It doesn’t really matter because they won’t be playing unless there’s a change of heart and you can’t really see that coming.
The guess here it’s a small suspension that is being done to send a message as much as anything else.
It’s Curl’s first suspension, but the third for Pulley. He sat for the first defensive series against Tulsa after a blatant unsportsmanlike conduct penalty before the final play of the Ole Miss game and he didn’t start against Vanderbilt due to a violation of team rules.
Morris is sending messages and this is one in a game that’s like a bowl game where coaches have traditionally used suspensions because it’s relatively meaningless. The Tigers are a 22-point favorite at ESPN’s PickCenter, which gives the Hogs 6.4 percent shot of winning.
If nothing else, we’ll see what some of these players that haven’t seen the field often can do, particularly in the secondary.
One thing that’s become clear, however, is this team has little upperclass leadership. There’s just not that one guy that will enforce things in the locker room and apparently nobody has a clue even how to do it.
One of the keys to John McDonell’s success in winning 40 national championships (and three times the triple crown) in track and field was the athletes policing things themselves.
The older guys didn’t tolerate new ones not doing things they way they’d been done.
There’s no telling how long the Hogs have been without that in football. It’s something you see in championship teams.
When Morris came in last December, he immediately created an inner council of players. The guess here is he did that to see how they handled self-enforcement. By the time he found out there wasn’t much real leadership there, he probably knew exactly what he was dealing with.
It’s the knee-jerk reaction for some fans to put this all on the coaches.
Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way, folks.
With a roster next year that will contain nearly half of players he’s brought into the program, we’ll see how things are going. It’s a wait-and-see situation.
Whether you like it or not.
