Chad doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s got a rebuild to do

This one is going to take awhile for Arkansas fans to get over.

Even though many fans weren’t holding out a lot of hope after last week’s fourth-quarter meltdown against Colorado State, nobody was thinking the Razorbacks would lose 44-17 to a Conference USA team.

As we said, many didn’t show up (slightly over 44,000 actually attended) and things went downhill in an ugly, ugly fashion.

Chad Morris said in the post-mortem later that he wasn’t calling this a rebuild, but that’s exactly what it is.

“No one in that locker room wants to hear the word ‘rebuild,’ especially if you’re a senior that’s invested time in this program,” he said.

They may not want to hear it. He may not want to say it.

But he better believe it and if he wants to reclaim a large part of the fan base, Morris might want to admit it and start building for the future.

He can look in the mirror until it falls off the wall, have the players stare a hole into every mirror in the multi-million dollar facilities and it’s not going to change anything.

That goes for some in the media, too, starting with me. I thought this team had a shot at getting seven, maybe eight wins. I reserved the right to revise and extend my preseason prediction and now I’m saying if this team gets three wins you might want to start checking for lightning bolts.

It starts with the most prominent position. Quarterback is a train wreck. No matter what Cole Kelley does in practice, he’s not a gamer. For whatever reason, when the lights come on, the band starts playing, he appears as lost as a goose in this offense.

“(The players) do want to hear the fact that you’ve got to get better and improve and find ways to improve,” Morris said.

He sounded as baffled by what happened in a game where the Hogs couldn’t do anything right against a Mean Green team that shouldn’t be 27 points better, but was on Saturday.

Morris said several times in the postgame everyone has to look in those mirrors.

“There are some guys that are playing especially hard,” he said. “We’ve just got to continue to develop and, again, like I said you’ve got to go back and look in the mirror.”

Again, though, like Razorback fans have done for years, it all starts with the quarterback and for this game that was going to be Kelley, who threw three interceptions in the first half and appeared several times to not be familiar with the same page of the playbook as his receivers.

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“I was trying to get to the point of staying with one guy as long as we could with the hopes to give the entire game to Cole,” Morris said, trying to explain what no one can really explain. “Cole had the better week of practice, so we made the decision to go with Cole and made the decision to stay with Cole in the second half.

“I wanted to see if he could rally us back.”

In other words, Morris wanted to see if he could pull off the same thing he did against Ole Miss last year in engineering that comeback. It was also a matter of showing some confidence in him.

“We got in there at halftime and had some good adjustments and talked and let him know that, ‘hey, we’ll go right back with you,’” he said.

Kelley started the second half and promptly threw an interception and that ended his day. Connor Noland was next, not Ty Storey, who had battled Kelley throughout fall camp and started last week.

“I didn’t want to put Ty in that situation with them being down that far,” Morris said.

Noland couldn’t do much, primarily because the offensive line couldn’t block a North Texas defense that at times was rushing only three people … and getting them to Noland almost as fast as the snap.

It was the same thing with John Stephen Jones later. Both of the freshmen threw an interception so the Hogs ended up giving the Mean Green six gifts.

At least the Hogs didn’t fumble a single time all day, which really may be the only positive you can see looking at the numbers.

Arkansas ended up with 336 yards of total offense, just 40 behind North Texas. That is a little deceptive, though, because the Hogs got 91 of those in the fourth quarter when the Mean Green were just sorta trying to get the game over with.

Where does Arkansas go from here?

We won’t know for awhile, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better. They start a stretch of games against Auburn, Texas A&M and Alabama in the next three weeks.

Unless something unseen happens, you don’t have to be an expert to know what direction things are headed.