Hogs’ schedule looks daunting now, but things tend to change

If there’s anything to be learned from years of covering college football at the highest level is these summer rankings usually don’t mean a whole lot by the end of September.

Right now, Arkansas has five teams in ESPN’s Way Too Early Top 25 on the schedule … but how many will even be in the rankings by the end of September?

That’s when things will start to get interesting.

One thing Razorback fans can sort of count on is they’ll have an idea whether to get their hopes up by then or start looking forward to Eric Musselman’s first basketball team.

If this team hasn’t eclipsed last year’s two wins by the time everybody assembles in AT&T Stadium for the annual game with Texas A&M, then it’s a good bet it will be a thin group calling the Hogs at the end of September.

Thank you, Michigan. If a team ever needed some easy games in September this is it and they would be playing the Wolverines if they hadn’t cancelled the series to play Notre Dame.

Don’t talk about attractive home matchups. After the last two years, fans will take a win over anybody at home. It’s been that thin.

Outside of a few psychotic internet trolls, it’s not out of the realm of possibility the Hogs go to Arlington sitting at 4-0. Let’s be objective here, the game with Ole Miss in week two is a toss-up.

If the Aggies are, well, get ready for a dogfight in the SEC West because that means they will have beaten Clemson on the road and Auburn the week before.

The guess here is A&M, ranked No. 12 the early ESPN rankings, will be — at best — 3-1 and won’t have a chance to do any early preparations for the Razorbacks or they will be 2-2.

Auburn has some talent, but not a lot of playmakers at the positions that I’ve found to be the most imporant — playmakers.

By the time Gus Malzahn’s team heads to College Station, they could already have a loss (opening against No. 10 Oregon) and it’s already a paranoid atmosphere around what has become a completely dysfunctional program.

The Hogs have Kentucky, Auburn and Alabama in October and the only guarantee there is they won’t lose four games that month. The Crimson Tide will be one of the top two teams in the country at that point.

Auburn could be reeling. They play Oregon, Kentucky, Texas A&M and Florida before the Hogs and LSU the next week in Baton Rouge. Malzahn should get coach of the year, in my opinion, if he goes 8-4 this year, but it wouldn’t be shocking if he’s gone by Halloween.

The team most folks are discounting how far they slide is Kentucky, who hosts the Hogs on October 12. To me THAT is the game that’s going to tell us how this season could be.

The Wildcats lost their best playmakers on both sides of the ball to the NFL, which is something you couldn’t say very often about football in Lexington.

November is a month where the Hogs have Western Kentucky after an earlier matchup with Mississippi State. What Joe Moorhead does in his second year is up for debate, even with some fans in Starkville who are scratching their heads over eight wins with four players in the first 44 taken in the NFL Draft.

At the end is Missouri, a team that can’t go to a bowl game, lost starting quarterback Drew Lock, who personally beat the Hogs two of the last three years.

Last year, Arkansas just showed up in Columbia, but Lock led comebacks in 2016 and 2017 that effectively put the bookends on Bret Bielema’s tenure in Fayetteville. He didn’t have to perform any heroics last year.

And LSU.

A story broke Friday at Yahoo Sports about an LSU fan allegedly paying the father of a player a rather large sum of cash.

While it apparently doesn’t involve Ed Orgeron directly, he’s going to have to pay the price for it, regardless. Experience has shown just the NCAA’s snooping can crash a program more than any sanctions they hand out.

No, there won’t be a prediction here on number of wins this season. We haven’t even seen the players in T-shirts and shorts yet.

But it might not be as grim as many think right now.