Hogs will need some bullets for final three games of season

Chad Morris just wanted to get away from the pressures of his first football season in the SEC when he finally got an off weekend.

Like a lot of Arkansas fans, he went to a deer stand in the woods with his son, Chandler.

He wasn’t particularly looking to kill anything.

“I didn’t even have bullets in the gun,” Morris said Monday. “I had no desire to do anything but sit there.”

You get the impression that’s how draining this 2-7 season has been on Morris. Not firing one bullet after another is something he hasn’t faced much in his coaching career.

When he got a chance for some peace and quiet, he just enjoyed the peaceful serenity out in the woods with his son, who had bullets but didn’t get anything, either.

Razorback fans can relate. It’s been that kind of year. The guess here is there were more than a few around the state as we kick into the heaviest hunting season of the year a couple just sat on the deer stand in silence.

“Maybe he didn’t want to shoot one,” defensive coordinator John Chavis, who IS an avid hunter, said after Morris on Monday. “When I go, you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll have bullets in the gun.”

Offensive coordinator Joe Craddock uses a bow-and-arrow when he hunts, so bullets in the woods aren’t a big priority.

“If it wasn’t a scouting trip, then I’d have arrows for sure,” Craddock said. “Other than a scouting trip, I’d load up and shoot.”

Apparently, this season has taken away everybody’s desire to shoot. The bye week featured a lot of recruiting evaluations.

Most of the work for the 2019 class is done. Oh, there are still a few holes they plan to fill, but the biggest part of the work is done, barring mass decommitments that nobody sees coming.

A lot of the focus has been on speed, which is something Morris talked about in his first press conference last December.

“You either have speed or you’re chasing it,” he said then.

This team has spent a lot of time chasing speed.

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In the practices during the bye week, there was a lot of scrimmaging with the players who haven’t seen the field much this year.

There were plenty of names thrown around about who looked good in the workouts, but whether we see any of them in many of these last three games remains to be seen. The coaches don’t want to use a redshirt for eight or nine plays, but they do want to see them play against SEC competition.

Chavis said the first priority is to win games, then develop talent.

Translated, that means in these final three games that if it’s close, you probably won’t see many young players in the game unless coaches have seen something that makes them think that’ll help them win that particular game.

We’ll see how that plays out.

For now, though, Morris, Chavis and Craddock all are just hoping they have some bullets left for these final three games.

They’ll need ’em.