Fans usually have a specific number of wins they want to see and everybody in the media takes a guess but Sam Pittman isn’t getting into that.
Like a lot of coaches he doesn’t look too far down the road. He’s certainly not going to give a number.
“We just wanna be better,” he said at SEC Media Days on Thursday. “If we’re quite a bit better we’d like to be that.”
There are more questions than answers right now for the coaches and everybody else. Maybe the only thing we pretty much know for sure is Treylon Burks is going to catch passes, Jalen Catalon is going to hit people and Grant Morgan is going to be maybe the best leader on the team.
Everything else right now is sheer speculation.
“If we can just keep growing our program and beating more people,” he said, “you can use that in recruiting. I just want to play hard and have our players better prepared. Bigger, strong and faster and then the results happen on the field.”
That’s going to be the most important thing of all. Especially winning games against the people expect them to beat.
Let’s face it, if they aren’t ahead of Rice, Georgia Southern and UAPB by 20 points at halftime there’s a problem. Even in the down years of the best coaches in Arkansas’ history, that’s what they did to teams like that.
Others got fired and the leash isn’t that long.
“Each year if we can just continue to improve, then we’ll have some huge success,” Pittman said.
The Hogs should have three wins and to get to a bowl game — which is the measurable most fans want — they’ve got to squeeze those out of the most difficult schedule in the country.
There are no teams in that group you can point to right now and say are a win. You might hope, but that’s a flimsy plan that usually doesn’t work out well.
Throw in the usual variables of injuries, bad calls and other stuff it’s going to be a week to week guessing game what the final number might be.
And Pittman isn’t going to throw one out there, either.
