Offense determines Hogs’ place in West pecking order

Since coming to the Southeastern Conference in 1992, Arkansas hasn’t won a single conference football title.

Let that sink in for a bit. They won the West in 1995 in a season that could not be called dominant, represented the West in the SEC Championship Game in 2003 because Alabama was on probation and won it outright in 2006, but losing the last three games kinda soured everybody on that year.

The Hogs were co-champions in 1998, Houston Nutt’s first season, but lost to Mississippi State to give the Bulldogs their only trip to the title game.

When I said on the radio in 2009 that expecting Arkansas to be at the top every year was a pipe dream, I was roundly criticized. My argument at the time was the Hogs are in the SEC West where you could win 10 games and still finish third in your own division.

Crazy was the nicest thing I was called.

Then came 2010 and 2011. Arkansas won 10 games in 2010 and tied LSU in 2010 for second place, but finished third among West teams in the final polls after the bowl games. That’s also, by the way, the only time the Hogs have finished ahead of Alabama in the West since Nick Saban arrived in 2007.

In 2011, they won 11 games (counting the Cotton Bowl), but still finished third in the SEC West with a fifth-place finish in the nation in the final polls.

Being in college football’s strongest division is the problem. It’s not revenue … the UA was 14th in college sports revenue in 2017. Pretty good until you realize it’s only fifth in the SEC West, ahead of only the Mississippi schools.

Only one football coach has lasted 10 years (which is a lifetime these days in college football) and that was Houston Nutt, who is only recently becoming slightly less polarizing than he was during his last years as coach.

His record of 75-48 overall is good enough to be fourth of Razorback coaches all time in terms of winning percentage and second in wins behind only Frank Broyles.

Bobby Petrino over-achieved for four seasons based on the recruiting he did, but the final two years of 21-5 probably wasn’t going to continue at that level. Graduation took a significant number of the playmakers on that high-flying offense and the quality wasn’t there behind them.

So where should Arkansas be every year in the SEC West’s pecking order?

History shows us they won’t be Alabama. Since coming into the league, the Hogs are 7-19 against the Crimson Tide, including an 11-year losing streak where they’ve only been within one score at the end twice.

It’s painful to throw anything from the last five years into the calculations because that was a mistake made hiring Bret Bielema that was boneheaded from the start. At Arkansas, you can’t hire a coach off the resume.

That’s never worked.

Danny Ford had a resume better than Bielema and that only lasted five years. The two coaches with the best head coaching resumes hired by the Razorbacks in the last 60 years were the worst hires over that time.

Let that sink in and it tells you it takes a different type of individual to win at Arkansas.

And nobody has won consistently without a gimmicky offense or defense.

Lou Holtz ran the Veer, which was about as gimmicky as things got in the mid-1970’s. Hatfield’s Flexbone scared the daylights out of some of the best coaches in the business. Nutt started with a fairly traditional offense, but Keith Burn’s defense was anything but that.

Then there were the Matt Jones’ years where even Nutt didn’t know what was going to happen with the offense half the time because Matt didn’t know after the ball was snapped how it was going to play out.

With Darren McFadden, Felix Jones and Peyton Hillis, plus maybe as good of offensive linemen at one time, the running game gashed everybody for an 18-9 run over two seasons.

Petrino was all about the offense, probably to the detriment of the defense.

There are reasons to believe a change might be in order.

Chad Morris comes in as one of the best offensive minds in college football. He basically took the nuts and bolts from Gus Malzahn’s offense and has added some wrinkles that have been successful everywhere he’s been.

For the record, Malzahn’s offense is nothing more than a collection of things in various offenses done out of a Dutch Meyer spread formation from the 1930’s. That made Davey O’Brien a Heisman winner (he was the shortest quarterback to ever win the award, a full three inches shorter than Doug Flutie and five inches shorter than Baker Mayfield).

Myer’s book in the late 1950’s that was the first published on the spread. Coaches adapted the single wing to it in the 1990’s and that was what Malzahn inherited in his first head coaching job at Hughes.

Hugh Wyatt had an article published in a coaching magazine in 1998 about his “Wildcat Package” for his high school team in Washington, where he moved a running back to take a direct center snap and run similar to what Malzahn started doing shortly thereafter.

“I think Gus Malzahn has selective memory,” Wyatt said in a book on offense published in 2010 talking about Malzahn’s creation of the offense.

“Hugh Wyatt,” Malzahn said in 2010 when asked about where he got the Wildcat. “I’ve heard that name. Well, I’m sure I got it from somewhere. I just couldn’t tell you where.”

Morris has put his own spins on it, incorporating the tight end heavily into the offense when he was at Clemson and had the talent at that position.

Now the good news is Bielema didn’t recruit players familiar with his style of ground-and-pound offense, which is why the last two years was more chuck-and-duck, as Buddy Ryan would call it, considering that’s what Austin Allen did most of the time.

Bielema recruited players more familiar with Morris’ style of offense, bulked ’em up, slowed ’em down and then waddled around confused as to why it wasn’t working.

At Arkansas, history shows offense wins the fans. Oh, some will use the old line that defense wins championships and, while it may be true, you better score at least 30 points a game these days if you want to win.

Morris’ offense will do that.

And a newly-energized John Chavis probably has a few tricks up his sleeve for the defense, which will be better than recent years. Oh, not a national championship-type defense, but better than recent years.

It’s a combination that could work at Arkansas. It has in the past, even without a coordinator the caliber of Chavis.

Offense has determined the Hogs’ place in the SEC West considerably more often than the defense since 1992. It’s a league that has a razor thin margin between winning and losing because everybody can move the ball and sometime you just have to outscore the other guy.

Don’t believe it? The Hogs had three games last year where one defensive stop would have won the game. Do that and we’re still watching Bert waddle around Razorback Stadium. They would have finished 7-6 or 8-5 (depending on the bowl outcome) and we’re still arguing.

You don’t think Chavis is worth one more stop per game for the Hogs?

The guess here it’s going to work better quicker for the Hogs than anybody’s thinking right now.