Bielema’s won a couple of battles, but not the war

FAYETTEVILLE — For the second straight week, Bret Bielema got a win he didn’t deserve.

At one point the television cameras caught Bielema with that sort of dazed and confused look he has at times in close games.

“That’s your interpretation,” he said. “I didn’t want them to see the word I was going to say. If you’re good at interpreting my facial reactions, I’m all for you.”

Well, of course, everybody’s getting good at it.

Especially when his teams tend to come out and stumble around against teams they should be handling.

Oh, the 39-38 squeaker over Coastal Carolina will go into the victory column, giving Arkansas a 4-5 record that looks better on paper than it actually is. That comes on the heels of a 39-38 win over Ole Miss last week.

Yeah, they are wins and nobody will dispute it beats a loss, but they don’t pass the eye test and more and more Bielema isn’t passing the eye test.

Just to give you a quick perspective, Arkansas has now won back-to-back one-point games where it had to come from behind against the worst team in the SEC West and a team that lost to Arkansas State, 51-17.

Bielema is starting to look like the guy that gets a beer poured over his head and he asks if it’s raining. He was in full spin control.

“Obviously, it was a game that our guys battled through,” he said later. “In the first half, anything that could go wrong did go wrong.”

Whether he intended to or not, Bielema more or less pointed the finger at himself and the coaching staff when asked about playing down to the level of a 1-7 opponent.

“Well, there’s no doubt in my mind we didn’t play as clean as we wanted to,” he said. “But we had a good week of preparation. I thought our guys were engaged.”

To interpret the coach-speak there, that means one of two things:

• The talent level isn’t there if they did have a good week preparing.

• The motivation isn’t there.

“The think I learned in this business a long time ago is anybody can beat anybody on either side,” he said, which is the standard fallback line when coaches don’t win a game the way they should.

Even LSU has had that problems. Bielema tried to point that out, I think. He had one of those half-sentence moments where the thought doesn’t make it to the finish line.

“LSU, they beat earlier by somebody they didn’t think — or the outside world thought that,” he said.

Don’t worry. You get used to figuring it out.

“Football is football, man,” he said. “You get a couple of big plays, it goes against you, you don’t catch a break, bad things can happen.”

Yeah, they can. It’s kinda like a war, which is made up of a lot of individual battles.

The win over Coastal Carolina one wasn’t as close as the one at Ole Miss, mainly because the Chanticleers panicked after Cole Kelley’s 1-yard run finally put the Razorbacks ahead, 39-38, with 1:55 to play.

“They got the momentum and we couldn’t get it back,” interim Coastal Carolina coach Jamey Chadwell said later. “We were trying to make a play.”

That was when the Hogs fumbled the ball on the 1-yard line when Austin Cantrell dropped it, but Johnny Gibson was able to fall on it.

Were there chances for Arkansas to put this one away? Yes.

Kelley came within inches of completing a 54-yard Hail Mary pass to Jonathan Nance at the end of the first half, but replay ruled the ball never crossed the goal, despite initially being ruled a touchdown.

That left the Hogs ahead 17-14 at the half.

Then Coastal Carolina proceeded to win the second half. Yes, a Sun Belt team won the third and fourth quarters against an Arkansas team that apparently still hasn’t gotten the hang of handling things after halftime.

Arkansas won the game because, simply, they had much better players.

And T.J. Hammonds.

After the Chanticleers had gone up 38-25 early in the final period, Hammonds took a simple handoff to the left, found a hole big enough for Bielema to run through and out-raced everyone 88 yards for the socre with 10:09 to play.

Coastal Carolina folded at that point.

Arkansas won this battle the same way they won the one at Ole Miss.

The Hogs had a little better luck against a team with lesser talent both weeks.

More than luck may be needed the rest of the way.

LSU has more players who are bigger, faster and stronger.

“It should be a fun week of preparation and we don’t have many of these left,” Bielema said.

We’ll see if he feels that way next Saturday evening.

Even though he’s won these last two battles, he hasn’t done a whole lot of convincing anyone he can win the war, which has three big obstacles left.

And if he doubts that, all he had to do Saturday was look in the stands.

By the end of the game, the 35,000 that started out (ignore the 61,476 announced attendance, which was an outright lie) had dwindled to less than 20,000.

When the fans don’t care how you do in the battle, they’ve already given up hope in the war.

Which may be Bielema’s biggest November battle.