Coming up with a record for Arkansas’ season in August is really just a challenge of hope and trying to rationalize that with what I haven’t seen or heard about with this team.
Add in we don’t now what’s going to happen with injuries to key people, but I don’t have a great feeling with two key players out for the season before the first game.
One reaction I’ve had on radio shows is their luck is going to have to change dramatically to have much success this year at all.
Losing tight end Maddox Lassiter is one thing. Having the punter go down for the year before fall camp even got started makes you question what kind of curse hangs over things.
To the reality, though, not having a starting quarterback named this far away from the start of the season is baffling.
It’s about as curious as hiring Ryan Silverfield in the first place because that’s not going with Razorback tradition that a lot of us old-timers look to see. He never was a coordinator anywhere that I can find in the places I looked and his six seasons at Memphis didn’t have a single championship.
That’s not particularly encouraging at the non-Power 4 level. Being an assistant position coach on some mediocre NFL teams doesn’t inspire confidence, either.
You can only hope athletic director Hunter Yurachek is seeing something the rest of us aren’t seeing or come to grips with the fact that in today’s world of college football it may have been the best he could get.
None of this is to say Silverfield’s a bad guy or has no idea what he’s doing. That’s not something that is obvious in any way, shape, form or fashion.
Silverfield may define a new way coaches should be evaluated. To say it’s an opportunity for him at this stage of his career could be an understatement.
The bottom line is we don’t really know any more about this team or coach headed into the season than we’ve known since he was hired in December.
After the ever-optimistic Pete Morgan did his game-by-game predictions for the year, I’m going to take a different path. That’s mainly because I don’t do those because there are too many variables.
Even his optimistic take didn’t get the Hogs into a bowl game at the end of the year.
Earlier I mentioned injuries, but there’s also the lack of knowledge of other teams who could suffer even bigger problems. Some will be better than expected and others will fall into a hole. Tell me who will do what and I can make a pick.
All of that is without even speculating on officials’ calls, which can go either way. Not being one of fall into the conspiracy theories some fans love to have, we’ll just have to see how it plays out.
There are some parameters to how I’m seeing this season shape up and it’s very broad-based. It’s very likely games they win, the ones they’ll likely lose. It will be the other wins that determine the final record.
At least that gives some wiggle room. Coaches are always optimistic. They have to be. It’s rare for a coach publicly to stand up like Lou Holtz used to do and say he can’t find a single win on the schedule.
Considering Holtz would then only lose one or two games, we would usually stand there and roll our eyes when he said stuff like that. We would also laugh openly about it. He didn’t really care.
This is just a straight way of defining the options.
Likely wins
North Alabama (Sept. 5) and Tulsa (Sept. 26). Easy or difficult doesn’t really matter because it’s a matter of winning being the only thing that really matters.
Likely losses
Georgia (Sept. 19), Texas A&M (Oct. 3), Texas (Nov. 21), LSU (Nov. 28). Considering this would give the Hogs a 2-4 record, it’s going to be hard to get much argument about these games. It’s half the schedule left and that’s where the wiggle room starts for this team.
Just a random pattern that’s happened more years than not for the Razorbacks is they tend to win a game nobody thought they had a chance of winning (for whatever reason) and lose a game there wasn’t a single soul picked them to lose.
I’ve sat through some losses to Toledo, Tulsa, TCU, Rice, Baylor and a staggering list during 2018-19 and I can’t explain them to this day.
It’s happened and it wouldn’t be surprising to see either of those take place this season.
Lean losses
Utah (Sept. 12), Tennessee (Oct. 10), Missouri (Oct. 31). To be completely straight, the game against the Vols could have gone either way considering the recent history, but the Vols do have better players that I know about and that will usually tilt the balance a little.
Exactly why the Hogs can’t figure out a way to beat the Tigers more than twice since 2014 remains a mystery to everybody.
Some of those years it was obvious but several Missouri wasn’t the better team and Arkansas almost invented ways to not manage a win.
Lean wins
Vanderbilt (Oct. 17), Auburn (Nov. 7), South Carolina (Nov. 14). Maybe the one with the biggest question mark probably should be Vanderbilt but I think they recruited better players and the program is on a higher money level.
A lot of those doctors that graduated there are giving back because somebody decided they wanted to win football games and have a coach that fits the program well in Clark Lea.
It’s strictly a matter of a ton of question marks for the Tigers and Gamecocks. Talking to media folks with those two schools sounds a lot like talking to the guys covering the Hogs.
About the only thing clear is somehow the Razorbacks are going to have to find four wins out of those six games to get into a bowl game.
Right now it’s impossible to pick with any certainty but I’ll go with a 4-8 record this year. Just don’t ask who.
