Either a lot of Arkansas fans laid the points Saturday or they really don’t have a grasp on how Sam Pittman works.
When the Razorbacks raced out to a 45-point lead at halftime, that was more than enough.
And Pittman knew it.
“Our goal at halftime was to play all 2’s and 3’s and win the second half and we didn’t do it,” he said later. “We couldn’t move the football with our 2’s and that was our 2’s.”
For some that’s not good enough.
A lot of folks seem to be in a panic over the second team offense not being able to run up and down the field on the Golden Lions or have Malik Hornsby flinging the ball around. That would be the normal offense.
Pittman just wanted to get some guys on tape and avoid any injuries. He also wanted to get the game over as fast as possible. That’s why there were only four passes in the third quarter and one in the final period. That’s not the Hogs’ normal offense.
UAPB wasn’t exactly looking to extend the pain.
“When the kid sees himself on tape, all this, ‘Well, I’m as good as somebody, and I’m as good, and I should be doing this.’ Well, okay,” Pittman said. “You’ve got a half of football. Let’s see what it looks like.
“And if it looks like what you’ve been saying, well then we’ll give you a few extra reps. If it looks like what we’ve been saying, then we’ve got to get better.”
That’s a polite way of saying if you stumbled around and couldn’t block anybody from UAPB, shut up and go back to work.
The backups didn’t exactly line up and run up and down the field on anybody and if you thought that was going to happen then you had unrealistic expectations.
Second-teamers don’t get the reps the starters do in practice. There are times you can mix in a couple with the starters and see a better end result.
Coaches don’t make a hockey-type line change very often.
And they know things are going to quite possibly get ugly putting an entire lineup of backups in the game at once. Even against the Golden Lions, who aren’t even a really good SWAC team this year.
What Pittman wanted to happen is how things played out Saturday.
The first team guys got three touchdowns from Treylon Burks, a punt returned for a score by Nathan Parodi and he got enough teaching tape on the backups to keep everybody busy during a bye week.
He was never going to hang 60 or 70 on UAPB.
Mainly because it wouldn’t prove anything to anybody except maybe a few in the Lunatic Fringe of Hog Nation.
