While not being one that particularly watches these national recruiting rankings a whole lot, my best advice for Arkansas fans is to not even look when the early signing day kicks off Wednesday morning.
The Razorbacks have never been a winner on the day everyone breathlessly waits for when 17 and 18-year-old kids put pen to paper to decide where they want to spend the next few years of their lives.
In the day and age of the transfer portal, though, I’m not sure it really matters. Everybody has somebody that hits the thing and it’s made a mess of college athletics, but it’s an issue other folks can worry about.
Don’t blame Sam Pittman for this mess. After being hired to clean up the disaster that is Razorback football, he’s only had a few days before things went silent Sunday night.
Pittman should get a pass on this first signing day. The first Wednesday in February, though, the guess here is he’ll bring in some players … hopefully some that actually make sense.
There’s been some head-scratching things done with personnel for more than a decade.
Bobby Petrino took what he inherited from Houston Nutt, got some talented playmakers and spent a season getting them to adapt, then won 29 games over three years. That wasn’t going to continue because he didn’t bother recruiting players to keep it going.
It was going to veer off the rails whether The Great Playcaller ran into the ditch or not.
After a season of giggles with John L. Smith the roster was suddenly suddenly depleted and Bret Bielema was shocked by the lack of receivers on the roster. He really wasn’t expecting that as it was a position pretty critical to Petrino’s offense.
During his first three years, the roster was built back up with offensive linemen that garnered national headlines. Bielema’s “thing” was supposed to be a builder of the interior lines of scrimmage on both sides.
By the time Chad Morris came in that was gone. He inherited basically nothing on the lines and that’s the one place that if you’re decent you can at least win some games.
Morris’ “thing” was quarterbacks. He recruited Deshaun Watson at Clemson, after all. Nobody paid much attention to the fact he had gone to SMU before Watson developed into a championship-caliber quarterback.
At Arkansas, the quarterback-savvy reputation pretty much went into the tank. Morris and offensive coordinator Joe Craddock couldn’t even decide on one, much less develop them.
Over two years there were eight starters … and Pittman inherits a roster with just three left and one of them started as a walk-on.
Pittman inherits a roster with some young talent at receiver and in the secondary, but not a lot of linemen. If he’s shown anything over his long career coaching that area it’s that he’ll get that fixed, maybe with a bunch of junior college guys.
This roster is maybe as thin as anything seen in the SEC. It’s the result of over a decade of poor evaluation, lack of development and a lack of interest in recruiting.
But don’t waste a lot of time talking about people that aren’t here. Fans spent way too much time doing that. If they aren’t here they really don’t matter, in my opinion.
And, yes, I’m very aware I just wasted a lot of words doing it for some context. It’s all a part of why things are in the shape they are in now, which is the bottom of the SEC barrel in football, but it didn’t get there because of the guy in charge now.
Pittman is the first new head coach of the Hogs that REALLY wanted to be here in over two decades. He’s shown he can recruit … he recruited Hunter Yurachek to hire him.
It will take a little longer for Pittman to get the players, but don’t be surprised if he puts it together sooner rather than later.
