Arkansas golf coaches Shauna Taylor and Brad McMakin met with the media Thursday afternoon via teleconference to talk about the shutdown’s effect on players, programs ahead of what looked to be good seasons.
Overstreet, Mistry on sudden end to season; coping with shutdown
Arkansas golfers Mason Overstreet and Kajal Mistry on his getting year back and her dealing with not being able to fly home to South Africa due to COVID-19 global pandemic.
Bud Light Seltzer Morning Rush Podcast — Worst fans in sports, RD, plus Arkansas legends
Tye & Tommy discuss sports they should compete in, Richard updates recruiting news, plus the worst fans in sports!
Eight years later Arkansas football still trying to get out of ditch
It was eight years ago that Bobby Petrino flew through the handlebars on the road to Elkins and for many Arkansas football fans the program hasn’t gotten out of that ditch to this day.
The day after that, April 2, 2012, was a day many were accepting Petrino’s explanation but it was interesting that athletics director Jeff Long seemed a little reserved buying everything at face value.
That was why I said on a radio program that morning that “we’ll see if Long buys that or calls BS on it.” It was early, I was still half asleep as a guest on the show and it just sorta came out … that happens in the radio business, by the way.
Watching the news reports the previous night and reading things something just didn’t seem right. Quite frankly, I didn’t know if we’d ever find out what really happened, but when a state trooper wasn’t going to get fired over Petrino’s reconfigured version of events it started spilling out.
Long then had his own little cover-up that had nothing to do with trying to shield Petrino but the fact he snatched the opportunity to become the front man. Multiple people in positions within the athletic department at the time have said Petrino was offered a way to keep his job but arrogantly declined.
So Long, who was as equally arrogant and an ego maniac close to Petrino’s level, fired him and did his best to come out as the hero. He parlayed that into being the first chairman of the College Football Playoff a few years later.
The combination of those two people set things on a path that, in hindsight, makes perfect sense.
Both were dictators that didn’t want anybody putting anything out there they didn’t get to sanitize first. Both were completely incompetent to run a program at the high-profile level of the SEC. They were both masters of illusion.
Petrino left a trail of broken promises, back-stabbing and selective amnesia everywhere he’d been. At one point he actually boarded a plane to visit with one school about replacing a head coach that he’d worked for at one point.
If nothing else, Petrino showed for four seasons that Razorback fans would look the other way on a dictatorship as long as his offense lit up the scoreboard most fall Saturdays. They would be so enthralled by his X’s and O’s they didn’t see the train wreck coming.
It’s a track record that continues to this day. Petrino really hasn’t shown he’s capable of coaching at any Power 5 conference (or the NFL) for more than a couple of years. He doesn’t have the people skills. That’s why he only won 56 percent of his games when he finally stayed somewhere five seasons.
Nobody could see that eight years ago. The truth is the Hogs weren’t going to win a national title in 2012 (despite Beano Cook’s prediction) even if he stayed. That was a 6-6 team with no depth behind the starting 22 players.
Long simply was on a quest for power. He got it by getting rid of just about everybody with traditional connections, pretty much trying to create a new path forward that fit his plan of a never-ending supply of money that the Razorback Foundation could keep hauling in.
He didn’t worry about the future because the guess here is he didn’t plan on being around when the bill’s due date arrived.
Long didn’t want any adult supervision and basically conned his way into getting that. He gave Bret Bielema a ridiculous raise and buyout after a 7-6 regular season, then wrote his own contract with a seven-figure buyout in case he got fired.
In other words, he wrote his own insurance policy. When he announced plans to tear down the North End Zone facility he got some pushback from former Senator David Pryor, but not a lot of other people who were riding high off some mediocre results the previous two seasons.
Two power-hungry ego-maniacs without adult supervision are the reason the Hogs’ football fans find themselves in a position with an average between four and five wins a season over the last eight years.
Don’t tell me about the other programs. The main cash cow at schools in the SEC is football. ESPN isn’t paying the league mega-millions every year to broadcast basketball, baseball or track meets.
That’s reality. To this day it’s hard to find anybody that worked directly for them that was disappointed to see either one leave
It’s also why the first couple of days in April will be etched in the minds of Razorback football fans for a few more years.
Or there are enough wins to wipe out nearly a decade of the result of incompetence colliding with arrogance.
Musselman’s relationships lands 6-9 transfer forward from New Mexico
Arkansas needed more height after last year’s 20-win season and Eric Musselman helped that a little Wednesday landing New Mexico forward Vance Jackson, who announced it via Twitter.
Can’t wait to hoop at Bud Walton Arena!????Let’s Get it!!!!#WPS @RazorbackMBB pic.twitter.com/FbeC1JBMB6
— VanceJackson (@VanceJackson1) April 1, 2020
Adrio Bailey ran out of eligibility when the postseason was cancelled after one win in the SEC Tournament in March and Jackson will be an upgrade there, at least in adding some length.
Jackson, a Top 100 recruit when he came out of high school in 2016, is three inches taller than Bailey at 6-foot-9.
This is not his first time moving.
He started his career at Connecticut as a composite four-star recruit out of Bellflower, California, a suburb of Los Angeles before transferring to New Mexico after just one season.
Jackson started 21-of-32 games at UConn, averaging 8.1 points per game in 26.1 minutes per game. He was 40.9 percent from the field, 39.7 percent on three’s and 67.6 percent from the free throw line and had 3.8 rebounds per game. Jackson was named Rookie of the Week in the All-American Conference on two occasions.
After sitting out a season following his transfer played in all 32 games (18 starts) and was named to the Mountain West all-tournament team playing against Musselman’s team at Nevada.
Jackson averaged 25.5 points, six rebounds, five assists and three steals per game and was the first player in Mountain West history to earn a spot on the all-tournament team without advancing past the quarterfinals.
As a junior, Jackson became a full-time starter for the Lobos and averaged 11.1 points per game with 5.3 rebounds per game, fourth on the team in points per game and second in rebounds per game.
He will be a graduate transfer with the Hogs and immediately available.
Recruiting dead period extended by NCAA until at least May 31
Landing recruits will continue to be done in a different way until at least May 31, according to an announcement by the NCAA on Wednesday, extending the on-going dead period for another couple of months.
“The Division I Council Coordination Committee and the Division II Administrative Committee extended the recruiting dead period through May 31,” the NCAA said in a release. “The committees will continue to be guided by experts to determine whether the date needs to be extended.”
This means no official or unofficial visits for football recruits, which happens quite a bit in the spring.
Evaluations also won’t take place and basketball spring signees and transfers may need to make a big decision without every having visited a school unless the signing date is moved back due to the ongoing global health crisis.
With the coronovirus pandemic forcing the NCAA to cancel everything for the spring, th entire world of college sports is wobbling with uncertainty. This is the first year since 1939 that March Madness is not being played.
Every sport across the world has been halted. The Masters has been postponed and Wimbledon cancelled. The Indianapolis 500 has been moved to August.
And football is in a holding pattern, waiting to see how things play out.
The NFL is plowing ahead with it’s annual cattle call for players and actually expanding the season and playoffs. They’ve dealt with shortened or chaotic seasons before and survived.
Now the second-most important aspect to football is basically an abbreviation. Yes, recruiting is literally a season all by itself with rankings and everything.
All we can do is see how it plays out.
Parr, Burnside on getting extra eligibility, dealing with downtime during crisis
Arkansas softball players senior Sydney Parr and junior Braxton Burnside on the past few weeks during a crisis that has them back at home and Burnside narrowly missing Jonesboro tornado.
Bud Light Seltzer Morning Rush Podcast — Best crowd reactions plus Pete Roulier
Tye & Tommy on the most disappointing football season since 2010, best crowd reactions, plus Pete Roulier!
Pittman probably won’t be making excuses, regardless with practices start
With a rather weird version of spring break now in the rearview mirror, no spring sports all of the attention is going to focus on football, which we don’t even know is going to happen at all this year.
The bottom line is nobody really knows anything for certain.
Coaches are all over the place. Some, like Brian Kelly at Notre Dame, have tried to throw out a drop-dead date of July 1 for college football’s season to start. That’s his opinion.
ESPN’s Kirk Herbsteit said he doesn’t see any football happening this year because there “has” to be a vaccine before they can start that. Again, that’s his opinion and news on the advancement of vaccines and treatments could far ahead of previous predictions.
Don’t expect a lot of clarity from the NCAA, either. This week they went said it was okay to grant another year of eligibility for athletes in spring sports … but they didn’t do much more than just give schools the go-ahead to figure it out for themselves.
A lot of these coaches want to maintain their “edge” and get players back into the “culture.” The guess here is losing all that is more of a concern than anything else.
They may want it, but they may have to deal with what they get.
Arkansas coach Sam Pittman is okay with that.
“We’re not going to harp on that,” Pittman said over a week ago before the school’s official spring break week started. “There’s some concern about all that stuff, but you can’t do anything about it.”
You got the idea he just wants to have any kind of interaction with his players and an actual football. By missing all of spring, he still hasn’t had anything with a ball involved.
Instead of worrying about what it may be, Pittman’s just going to deal with the way it is and make the best of it. He’s done that before.
“I was a head high school coach at three at three different schools and maybe you go back to something like that,” he said. “Everybody will be in the same boat.”
Which is not what some of the coaches want, whether they’ll say it publicly or not. They spent years getting a program built with their own routine and now the whole dang thing is going to be disrupted for several months.
That drives coaches crazy.
Pittman wanted spring practice and time with his players to just find out more about them, how to coach them.
He isn’t going to use a later start as any sort of excuse.
“If they said you couldn’t have anything and just have the regular time you have in August — just Tuesday, Wednesday practice — you’re going to practice about half your season before the first game starts,” he said.
He admitted it might slow down the pace of installing new things like offenses and defenses under new coordinators, but then again when he was coaching high school that’s basically what they did every year.
Older high school coaches will remember the days when they had to spend every preseason practice teaching half the team everything from how to put on a uniform to whether the ball was blown up or stuffed.
Pittman won’t have that issue.
Maybe the closest thing to this is looking at when the NFL had strike years that wiped out big parts of the regular season in 1982 and 1988. Especially 1987 when nine games were wiped off the regular-season slate.
In 1987 there was just one game lost in the regular season, but replacement games with (literally in some cases) walk-on players caused two of the more interesting seasons in pro football history.
The product on the field wasn’t as high of quality those seasons, but it was interesting.
This may be an incredibly interesting year in college football.
Some coaches will complain for at least a year about the problems.
Those are the ones expected to win a lot of games, but didn’t. There will be some of that, regardless when things get restarted in college football.
It’s called an excuse disguised as a reason.
The guess here is Pittman doesn’t plan on using either one of those.
