If Chavis is excited, that should have fans pumped, too

John Chavis is saying a lot these days.

For someone who’s been a longtime defensive coordinator in the SEC at the highest levels, he’s never been particularly in the limelight, according to people who have followed his career closer than me.

Some longtime SEC football observers told me when he was hired in January that he didn’t do a whole lot of off-campus recruiting and, well, they didn’t know a whole lot more because you never heard from him much.

Apparently Chad Morris has changed all of that.

Chavis is, by all appearances, totally pumped about his new team at Arkansas. More than that, he’s excited about Morris’ vision.

“Obviously, I’m as excited as I’ve ever been,” Chavis told Clay Henry of WholeHogSports.com in a story last week.

That in itself is cause to raise an eyebrow.

Oh, Chavis has always had a burning desire to win. You don’t become one of the top defensive coordinators in college football, heading up two defenses that make it to the national championship game and multiple SEC Championship Games without that.

Morris walks, talks and acts like a winner. In well over 40 years of covering college sports I’ve noticed a trend of coaches who are winners wherever they are. Some coaches win at a certain place as long as they stick with that system.

Others go win wherever they are.

Anybody who dug more than a iittle bit would have had grave doubts in December 2012 that Bret Bielema would be very successful at Arkansas.

Many of the national experts, who have a remarkable track record of not being more than a layer or two deep in their thinking, said it was a home-run hire. As I said on the air at the time and wrote it was the worst fit at Arkansas since Otis Douglas in 1950.

As he waddled through five seasons that had varying degrees of success, but massively under-achieved, he did nothing to change my mind. Bielema actually coached most players down while pointing out the needle-in-a-haystack accidental successes he had at Wisconsin.

Morris has had success simply by working as hard as anybody in college football. Other schools are already taking notice, according to people at various places around the league (and that’s not other media people, but folks inside programs).

Some media wags like to point out that the Hogs were 4-8 last year and probably won’t be any better this year because they’re changing systems, players won’t adjust to it and, well, by golly, those guys just weren’t very good.

They weren’t very good, apparently, because they were overweight, sluggish and out of shape. Oh, they may have been able to life a truck, but they couldn’t outrun one. In the SEC you better be able to at least keep up with the truck.

“You’re either recruiting speed or chasing speed,” Morris said at his very first press conference and he hasn’t altered that stance one bit.

Speed was tied for first as the biggest problem on this team the last few years along with being out of shape. Look no further than fourth-quarter collapses over five years.

It’s easy for fans to forget the Hogs lost three games decided by one score. They won just two, over Ole Miss and Coastal Carolina. Yeah, chew on that one for a bit.

Arkansas was outscored in the second half last season by a whopping 231-165. That’s an average of 5½ points a game for ALL games. Every coach I talked to pointed to conditioning as a key factor when that happens.

No, the Hogs’ talent wasn’t the biggest problem. There were injuries, particularly to feet and ankles during Bielema’s tenure. As players have slimmed down they have gotten quicker, faster and practically eliminated those injuries.

Morris saw all of that and it’s part of his plan to fix quickly, which is already being done.

The other part is that vision. This staff works as hard as any football staff I’ve seen in the SEC recruiting, recruiting and more recruiting. People that follow this staff say the difference there since the coaching change is night and day.

There’s that vision thing again. It’s what has Chavis excited.

“Everyone has to be pulling together and to see the vision the head coach has,” Chavis said in the story in WholeHogSports.com last week. It’s fun being at what I call ground level in terms of building this program and to be part of the Chad Morris era. I’m fired up and excited.”

That should be enough to get the fans excited.

And, if you read between the lines of what every one of the coaches say, they actually believe this team will be better than what most think.

It’s not WHAT they say. It’s HOW they are saying it.

They say it like it’s a fact.

Not like they are trying to convince themselves.