Tye & Tommy on how Arkansas was ranked every game in 2010-2011, JWright joins, plus best home advantage for Razorback sports!
Young leaders could be key to Razorbacks turning football around, says Wright
Jarius Wright has a pretty good take on what’s required to get Arkansas football out of the ditch it’s been in for the last eight seasons and the leadership may have to come from some talented younger guys.
“They don’t put an age on leadership,” Wright said Wednesday morning with Tye Richardson and Tommy Craft (The Morning Rush) on ESPN Arkansas. “That doesn’t matter.”
It was his high school coach at Warren, Bo Hembree, who pointed out before Wright played a down with the Razorbacks his football IQ. Bobby Petrino agreed.
That know-how about football translated into leadership on the field from early on in his career.
“When I stepped in I always wanted to be a leader,” Wright said. “I didn’t say a lot but I tried to show it by example.”
A lot of that young leadership could come from young receivers like Trey Knox and Treylon Burks. Throw in an experienced quarterback in Feleipe Franks and it’s off to a good start.
“Coach (Sam) Pittman is an offensive line guru so we’re going to be fine on offense up front,” Wright said.
It comes down to having that right mix of players that can actually follow through on a lot of what previous coaches talked about but never got players to actually buy in.
“You have to get the right type of guys, the right type of leaders and guys who put it on the line for each other,” Wright said. “You have to be able to trust each other. You have to be able to look at each other and know the guy beside you is going to do his job. That just comes with the right type of guys.”
But it starts at the top with the guy in charge and Pittman has impressed Wright so far.
“Number one the right coach,” Wright said about what it takes to turn things around. “I think we have that set in place. He’s got the right coaches around him set in place.”
Through eight seasons in the NFL with Minnesota and Carolina, Wright knows having the right assistant coaches is a huge key.
“A lot of it is the right coaching, the right teaching and the right things,” he said.
Wright’s relationship with Burks
When you come from Warren, just about everybody knows everybody else to some extent.
No exception with Wright and Burks.
“I basically watched Treylon grow up as a little kid,” Wright said. “Me and his uncle were pretty good friends and hung out a lot each and every day. I got to watch him grow up and it’s like we’re almost family.”
The price for players turning things around
When Wright was a freshman in 2008 the Hogs were 5-7 that included a big comeback win over LSU in War Memorial Stadium the day after Thanksgiving.
“We all knew we could have had a better year,” he said. “We knew it was a building process and we understood that. We also knew what losing felt like and we knew this next year we didn’t want to lose. We don’t like the feeling of losing. It was contagious and the team wanted to win.”
They improved to 8-5 in 2009 then went on a 21-5 run. It didn’t come easy.
“A lot of blood, sweat and tears … that’s for sure,” Wright said of the Hogs’ price to start winning. “I can honestly say there were times that I didn’t know if I wanted to play football anymore. It came to that as far as conditioning, working out each and every day.
“As a young kid it can be a little overwhelming. We worked hard. It wasn’t easy at all. We pushed each other to work hard and we wanted to win.”
Coming up just short in senior season
The last time the Hogs were in the race for the national championship was 2011, but they finished third in the SEC West after losing in the final week to LSU.
The loss still stings.
“We should have played in the national championship game that year,” Wright said. “We should have beaten LSU when we jumped out 14 at LSU. That was the same year LSU and Alabama played in the national championship game and if we’d won (against LSU) we wouldn’t have had to play in the SEC Championship and that would have been us (in the title game). I know it’s history now, but we definitely had opportunities.”
Wright understands now Petrino’s constant pressure
Petrino’s steady barrage on the players during practice each week made things tough on them and it too Wright awhile to actually take the positives from it
“Then I didn’t like it, but now as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized he prepared you for everyday life,” he said. “It was more than football. I didn’t realize the big picture at the time but he prepared you for rough times. This might sound crazy comparing football to life, but he definitely made you a tougher person.”
But he’s still not telling any Petrino stories, despite the fact he did the best impersonation of the former coach and once got caught. Petrino walked in during one of Wright’s “fake Petrino” deliveries.
“I don’t think I should share any of those,” Wright said, laughing. “I don’t think he’d be too happy. But I can tell you I never got it as bad as the quarterbacks. Just know there’s things we don’t want kids to hear.”
Not hearing much from teams during shutdown
After the radio interview Wright said he hasn’t heard a whole lot from NFL teams.
He played five seasons in the NFL and came close to playing in a Super Bowl in 2017. That was followed by a couple of years at Carolina.
Now he’s just waiting on a team to call, but that probably won’t happen until the NFL sets dates for training camps and starts talking to players.
Even without the current coronavirus shutdown the pace on that picks up in June.
Riley’s ‘ridiculous’ comment may end up being just a little off the mark
Bob Bowlsby managed Tuesday to grab a couple of headlines by once again appearing to wait until the bandwagon gets rolling before jumping under it, most people missed the fact we’re probably going to have football.
The Big 12’s man in charge too often sounds like a politician instead of a leader.
With everybody expecting the NCAA to announce Wednesday that players can return to campuses in June for those “voluntary” workouts, Bowlsby was trying to hedge his comments.
“If we’re not, we’re looking at probably having to delay the season a little bit,” he told ESPN, “but it’s too early to know if we’re going to be able to make that or not.”
You’ll notice he’s not saying — or even hinting — that there won’t be a season. It’s looking more and more like as common sense begins to return to some folks that we’re going to have college football.
And it won’t be shut down if there’s a few positive tests.
As Laura Rutledge pointed out on ESPN, the question of IF there will be football is fading fast as the questions now are starting to focus more on how schools deal with all of the safety precautions they’ll have to take.
Teams are going to handle it much the same way they’ve handled the flu. The disclaimer here is nobody is saying it’s the same thing, but that’s the way they’re going to handle it which is where I’ve kinda figured this whole deal was going to end up being handled.
Exactly what the facts are appears to rest with what scientist you want to believe.
Everything on this is moving fast. The facts are vaccines and treatments are being fast-tracked unlike anything I’ve seen.
And I’m old. I was born during the Asian Flu pandemic (that killed over a million people worldwide) and was in junior high during the Hong Kong Flu pandemic (another one that killed over a million people) and there wasn’t this sort of widespread panic.
Certainly no coaches said anything like Oklahoma coach Lincoln Riley did last week.
“All the talk about these schools wanting to bring players back on June 1 is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard,” Riley said in a Zoom chat with reporters. “We’ve got to be patient. We have one good shot at it.”
Considering he’s had a team in the College Football Playoff every year has given him the confidence to wax poetic on the fast-moving target this whole coronavirus thing has become.
Shoot, even Notre Dame announced Tuesday it’s opening up the campus for fall classes, which means — at least in theory — the game with Arkansas on Sept. 12 is still on go.
The SEC is expected to make an announcement Friday they are allowing workouts to resume sometime in June with safety precautions and restrictions.
And Riley shows that even the best coaches are better off staying in their lane.
Which, apparently, doesn’t include gazing into a crystal ball to predict future events in the real world.
Bud Light Seltzer Morning Rush Podcast — Sam Pittman ranked, Courtney Fortson joins and more!
Tye & Tommy on where Athlon Sports ranks Sam Pittman, Courtney Fortson joins, plus Would You Rather Tuesday!
Fortson recapping days with Hogs, playing in China, relationship with Musselman
Former Arkansas player Courtney Fortson has done well playing basketball in China, but he admitted Tuesday morning to Tye Richardson and Tommy Craft (The Morning Rush) things are a little different there.
He also went down memory lane on some of the bigger games the Razorbacks won while he was in Fayetteville plus knowing Hogs coach Eric Musselman.
Big week ahead as announcements may clear path for some kind of football
Last week everybody we talked to or heard in interviews on the national scene fully expects some sort of college football this season, but nobody knows what it will look like.
Sports Illustrated, citing numerous sources said over the weekend the NCAA Division I Council, a 40-member decision-making body made up of key college athletics figures, could vote Wednesday to remove the ban on on-campus activities.
Add in the encouraging news about a possible vaccine (that will be fast-tracked in what could be an unbelievable record time) caused the stock market to shoot up Monday and announcements on college athletics coming this week.
The NCAA has their meeting Wednesday, then the SEC has already said they will have an announcement of some sort Friday.
There was always going to be football in the fall. It’s too big to fail and a lot of colleges can’t afford NOT to have it.
Schools are going to have to re-design just about everything in their athletic facilities. Thank goodness it’s somebody else’s job to reconfigure a weight room.
Locker rooms will be not be used as normal … at least in the summer. There’s no sharing of water bottles, towels or anything like that. It’s all going to be spaced out … at least in theory.
All food and drinks will be pre-packaged.
There is even a thing called a RAZOR, according to a story in Sports Illustrated, that is like a fogger on steroids for athletic environments.
In other words everything indoors will be fogged with one of those RAZOR things, which does create an interesting marketing angle for the Hogs.
It’s one of the things that was originally created to help stem flu outbreaks and this current virus works in much the same way in terms of how you get it.
Despite the panic doom-and-gloom predictions of some, there is a strong possibility of football starting on time and playing a full schedule.
Don’t expect it to be equal for all 130 teams, though. Too many different rules in different states and it’s sounding like the ones in states that allow it will go full steam ahead while others, well, won’t.
“It’s not going to be equitable,” Craig Thompson, commissioner of the Mountain West, told Sports Illustrated last week. “There are no equal solutions.”
The key thing, though, is there probably will be football.
New father Neighbors on the fun and games being a new dad
Arkansas women’s basketball coach Mike Neighbors is a new dad and Bowen Stone Neighbors will be a member of the Class of 2039 as he told Derek Ruscin and Zach Arns (Ruscin & Zach) on ESPN Arkansas on Monday afternoon.
It wasn’t easy being a New Yorker coming into Alabama, Gold says
It was one thing for Eli Gold to get the job as the play-by-play announcer for Alabama in 1988 but another was getting a diehard fan base to accept a New York native calling the games.
“Now I’m accepted,” Gold told Phil Elson, Matt Jenkins and Matt Travis (Halftime) Monday afternoon on ESPN Arkansas. “It was a difficult start.”
He started doing men’s basketball in 1988-89 because then-coach Wimp Sanderson had noticed his work in Birmingham. Gold added football in 1989 after John Forney retired after three decades,
Forney and Gold are the only two football announcers for the Crimson Tide since Paul “Bear” Bryant got the job there in 1958.
And that is where most of the complaints came from with a Brooklyn guy who came to Birmingham to do ice hockey taking over a job as high profile in Alabama as any elected official.
“It took awhile,”. It probably took 10-12 years and for some people longer than that. I was a pro sports guy with no ties to the university. It was a difficult time.
“There were people that thought it was terrible I was selected to do the football and basketball games. It was not pleasant. Thankfully, the university stuck with me and here we are 32 years later.”
With Arkansas joining the Southeastern Conference in 1992, Gold started coming to the state every other year since then but it was his only trip to War Memorial Stadium that sticks out in his mind.
“Then-Gov. Bill Clinton attended,” Gold said of the game in 1992 during his first initial presidential campaign. “It showed me how impactful college football is when he took time out of a presidential campaign to get the eyeballs college football brought to him. No pun intended, but it was an eye opener for me.”
He hasn’t had to call many Crimson Tide losses since the Razorbacks came into the league, either. Alabama holds a 21-7 record over that time frame and the last win by the Hogs was in 2006.
“Bama has done pretty well against the Razorbacks over the years,” Gold said.
