FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — That four-game road stretch everybody talked about for Arkansas back in August turned out to be worse than predicted. That’s because they left town with an unexpected loss on the board.
Suddenly, the Razorbacks are 2-5 and losing any wiggle room to get to any bowl is disappearing fast. Don’t look for any predictions from me because it’s all a guess right now. Not even next week’s game against Mississippi State is a guarantee of anything. If nothing else, everybody should have learned by now last week has nothing to do with last week, much less what happened a year ago.
At times after Saturday’s 24-21 loss to Alabama, even Sam Pittman resorted to invoking hope, his pride in the players and coaches plus resorting to divine providence for everything else that’s happened in these last five games. The bottom line is he probably still doesn’t have any answers he’s going to tell us about. If Sam doesn’t know the answers, that’s a whole differen tot problem for somebody else to figure out.
The really frustrating part for the fans are the the close losses. Some of them are downright sick of being close, mainly because that’s been the word used most ovent now for over a decade. Maybe even worse is that’s about the only hpe the Hogs have for the future because it’s pretty hard to look at that schedule and find four games you can guarantee will be wins.
Failing to get that will mean no bowl game, which means no extra time for evaluation practices. Most of that goes to the SEC office for distribution anyway and the Hogs will get their share of what everybody else does. Why do you think schools like Vanderbilt stay in the league? They could go to a smaller conference and qualify for some kind of bowl game. The real attraction for the Hogs is the extra practice time in December. Win half of those close losses and there would be hope.
“We’ve got to finish somehow and we’re just not doing it,” Pittman said Saturday. “You have to continue to fight, continue to get better and if we’ll do that surely there’s going to be some team not ranked in the top 15 in the country that’s going to play us at some point at our place. We’ve just got to continue to fight and all those things. We’ve got a hard road to get bowl-eligible, but that is our goal. We’ve got to start it Saturday.”
Mississippi State meets that criteria and Sam knew there. They’ve got injuries, too, but after a bye week we really don’t have any idea what kind of team is coming in here. There is one thing, though, about the Bulldogs that hasn’t changed as their record has been good on occasion and bad a lot and that’s they want to beat the opponent up physically. In Mississippi, Ole Miss wants to win the parties and State wants to win the fistfight.
This one may come down to the mental aspect of the game. At least the Bulldogs are just 3-3 overall on the year. It’s that kind of year. Missouri is already bowl eligible and in a logjam of one-loss teams behind Georgia in the East. Florida’s also in that group and those two teams alone could keep the Hogs from going to a bowl game.
It’s getting down to crunch time. There is a mathematical possbillity after this week the Hogs would be in a position of having to win all of their last games just to make any kind of bowl game before Halloween. That wasn’t expected by anyone back in the summer.
But Hog fans have hope they can keep it close facing the best teams left on the schedule. That’s about all they have left to hope for these days. Don’t even start with who should be hired or fired because we don’t have a vote. But everybody can have hope, right?
