Tye & Tommy on the football unit most affected, transfer rule pushed back, Masters throwbacks and more!
Voting continues in Round 2 of the greatest Razorback football game of all time bracket
The opening round of voting for the greatest Razorback football game of all-time bracket went great! But it’s time to continue the bracket! Today, we open up 2nd round voting in the Broyles Region! Make sure to submit your votes below!
It’s time for Round 2 of the Greatest @RazorbackFB Game of All Time Bracket! Today, we open up 2nd round voting of the Frank Broyles Region! Click the link below to vote now!https://t.co/MkUUKDYvBz
— ESPN Arkansas & HitThatLine.com (@HitThatLineAR) April 13, 2020
Click here to view the full bracket!
Tomorrow (Tuesday), we will have opening round voting for the Paul Eells Region! Get out there and vote on what you think the Greatest Razorback Football Game of All Time!
Hogs playing in Little Rock still bad idea regardless how good talks going
During a time when no games are being played, the talk turned to Arkansas playing football games in Little Rock a little early this year and the bottom line is it’s just talk.
Razorbacks athletic director Hunter Yurachek said the politically correct things he has to say and everybody with War Memorial Stadium did likewise.
The best-case scenario happened, which was everybody had a nice conversation.
With no games to be played in Little Rock this year for the first time in several decades, that’s all anybody has left to do is talk about getting the Missouri game there in 2021.
It shouldn’t be played there. The Hogs should have quit playing there over 40 years ago when I first suggested it in a column. War Memorial was a dump then and now it’s still a dump with a fresh coat of paint in places and new carpet that is still a disorganized and dysfunctional facility.
Oh, don’t think for a second I don’t understand the arguments to continue playing there (and I have some really good, longtime friends that are on that side), it’s just something I don’t agree with.
The tradition of Arkansas football is too often confused. If they marketed it correctly and quit all this waffling around with goofy alternate logos and stuff they have the most unique brand in all of college athletics. Playing in Little Rock should be just some fond memories.
Just like driving autos with the crank to roll windows up and down, a limited number of FM radio stations, no cell phones and before personal computers were even invented.
Going to Razorback games in War Memorial quit being a cultural experience several years ago. Part of it is the decline of the team.
Since 2011 the Hogs haven’t won a game of any significance there. They stumbled around against Samford and pulled out a 31-21 win in 2013 then beat Alcorn State (2016) and Florida A&M (2017)
The record is 3-7 in the last seven games played there and 0-4 against SEC teams since beating Mississippi State there in 2011. Yes, the Hogs haven’t won a league game in that stadium since 2011.
But the biggest part of the whole deal is the stadium can’t afford to upgrade to the requirements of football in this day and age. Even Razorback Stadium is going to have to do some upgrading, in my opinion.
Yes, the percentage of season ticket renewals are up … that’s people renewing from a 33 percent renewal last. What I want to see is how the overall number of season tickets sold compares to the last decade.
In 2019, there was a 33 percent renewal of season tickets from 2018. Now there’s a 77 percent renewal of THAT low number. From an accounting perspective that’s still a number that’s going down in overall tickets sold.
But back to Little Rock. This isn’t a criticism of the Central Arkansas area or comparing the two general areas. Nope, not getting into that debate. I don’t believe it will cost donations, either, because the folks writing the checks that matter have egos that won’t let them quit writing the check in spite of what they may say.
War Memorial, bless it’s ancient heart, has parking issues, operational issues and technical issues (although the scoreboard did function for most of the Hogs’ game with Missouri last November).
They still have a bleacher capacity for 45,000 or so that is now 55,000 because the didn’t add that many seats, but squeezed everybody in a little tighter. People tell me it’s the most uncomfortable place they’ve ever tried to watch a game … including most high school stadiums.
Fayetteville has an issue in that area, too, which is why I think they are going to have to put in a lot of chairback seats with cupholders to entice fans back into the stadium. Wins alone isn’t going to do it.
All that changed in 2014 when the SEC Network came into being and every single game is now on television. People have spent thousands of dollars creating their personal gameday experience … in their own house. It’s more comfortable there than fighting traffic and squeezing into some aluminum seats and rolling the dice on who’s around you.
But War Memorial’s biggest problem is it really doesn’t matter if Yurachek, the governor or even a straw poll of fans is taken. The SEC has to sign off on it.
It was the league that nixed the spring game being cancelled before the ongoing global health crisis did it. In hindsight they could have waited a few weeks and never had to deal with the whole decision.
Nobody else plays games away from their home stadium. They can’t use it as a recruiting advantage anymore. About the best anybody can do these days is wave at recruits if nobody’s paying close attention.
That is, by the way, how Yurachek can tell the truth about acknowledging War Memorial without having to make a decision. It is, ultimately, a league decision and they’ve already shot down the spring game being played there.
Who knows what they’ll say about playing there next year.
We don’t even know if there will be football this year.
Listen to replay of Razorbacks’ 2015 win over LSU in Baton Rouge at 2 p.m.
Arkansas running back Alex Collins ran for 148 yards and scored a pair of touchdowns in a surprising 31-14 win over No. 9 LSU in Baton Rouge and you can listen to it at 2 p.m. at HitThatLine.com or ESPN Arkansas. CLICK HERE
NCAA may be close to opening door to limited free agency for players
While the rest of the sports world is paralyzed by the ongoing global health crisis, the NCAA is moving right along with plans that could provide a college version of limited free agency for players, according to a story at ESPN.com.
It’s not official yet, but the NCAA Divsion I Council is going to discuss a one-time transfer permitted to players on April 24 and vote on it May 20.
Yes, while the rest of the world is crawling along the kangeroo court that rules college sports and usually is slower than a nail is moving at breakneck speed.
According to the story by Jeff Borzello:
There are currently 746 Division I men’s basketball players in the transfer portal, 181 of them classified as graduate transfers. That means 565 players have entered the portal with the expectation of sitting out the 2020-21 season, in accordance with previous NCAA transfer regulations. If a change is enacted that would allow first-time transfers to play immediately at their next school, and it’s put into effect for next season, most of those 746 players would be able to play right away.
That could change just about everything. The details of this will be the most intereting part because there could be a team make almost wholesale changes from the end of one season to the start of the next.
It’s a good bet that happens May 20.
The other way that may be moving faster than anyone expected is some form of payment to players for their “name, image and likeness.”
The NCAA vice president for Division 1 had a video released via Twitter on that Friday:
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1YqJDELjdZDxV
“I think there may be some who are actually surprised, candidly, at how far these recommendations are going and how robust they are,” Lennon said.
But there won’t be a pay-for-play setup.
“You need to have the right parameters to make sure that it is not a pay-for-play model, that we don’t create an employer-employee relationship, that we protect the integrity of the recruiting process,” Lennon said.
Take that however you want.
The most interesting part of these two changes under consideration by the NCAA is not each rule independent of the other but that they are even being mentioned at the same time.
Or they could just save a lot of time and check with Alabama for football, Kentucky in men’s basketball and just go ahead and adopt their recommendations.
That’s usually how these things are enforced anyway.
Musselman lands grad transfer guard from Northern Kentucky
Eric Musselman has landed a graduate transfer in the middle of this global health crisis when Northern Kentucky guard Jalen Tate announced via Twitter his intention to come to Fayetteville.
✍????✍????✍???? pic.twitter.com/t1j2pBi1GA
— SnowBody™ #FTN ???????? (@jtate_the_great) April 10, 2020
Tate, 6-6, 170, averaged 13.9 points, 5.4 rebounds and 3.6 assists per game with the Norse. He was named the MVP of the Horizon League Tournament after averaging 19.3 points per contest through three games.
He is the second grad transfer Musselman has landed after Vance Jackson from New Mexico committed to the Razorbacks less than 48 hours after putting his name in the transfer portal.
Torres thinks Jones will climb in eyes of NBA people leading to draft
You can now apparently put Aaron Torres of Fox Sports Radio and Kentucky Sports as another one that has now had what I’ve started calling The Mason Jones Effect.
It tends to happen with Jones, who has a drive that can be lost with his infectious personality … and it got Torres, who does a podcast on men’s college basketball and college football.
“I don’t think I realized where he started,” Torres said Friday afternoon on Halftime on ESPN Arkansas.
Jones’ story is well known to Razorback fans. He went from being a chubby kid that initially couldn’t make his high school team, dropping the weight, going to junior college and, finally, landing at Arkansas.
In his second year he led the SEC in scoring and was co-MVP of the league.
Now he’s apparently leaning towards turning professional, which Torres feels is going to happen.
“I got the sense talking to him that his college career is done,” Torres said.
He thinks Jones’ stock could go up before the NBA Draft, which is usually in June, but nobody really knows during the midst of a global pandemic and the league is trying to figure out a way to have playoffs.
Jones never was going to be a one-and-done, which may not be that big of a deal, according to Torres.
“That narrative is starting to change in basketball,” he said. “(Players with more than a year in college) are the kids that are having success at the NBA level. There’s some value to a kid with dirt under his fingernails.
“Kevin Durant goes out in the NBA Finals last year and everybody else on the floor played two or three years.”
Torres apparently was impressed with Jones on his podcast.
“He talks more than most high-level NBA Draft prospects,” Torres said. “He wasn’t afraid to admit that he has a chip on his shoulder. He was not about cliches.”
There’s also another factor that could play in Jones’ favor through all this, Torres said.
“Most of the people that do the mock drafts don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “In the NBA there are good GM’s and bad GM’s. A lot of the NBA guys are still playing catchup on guys. You can’t help but turn on the film (of Jones) and be impressed.
“This kid can put the ball in the bucket in a number of different ways.”
Bud Light Seltzer Morning Rush Podcast — On being a proud state, Mase recap and more!
Tye & Tommy on the Arkansas video, recapping Mason Jones plus Jimmy Dykes!
Sutton’s selection something former players, assistants expected, says Dykes
Jimmy Dykes has played and worked for Eddie Sutton for a lot of years so the official announcement Sutton was headed to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame last weekend was a relief as much as anything.
“We’ve always thought in our hearts he was a Hall of Famer,” Dykes told The Morning Rush statewide on ESPN Arkansas. “It was nice to have it validated like it was. I talked to the family Friday night after they found out he was selected and it was a sweet moment.”
Sutton, who is unable to talk because of health issues, still hears pretty well and communicates through his family and Dykes said they held the phone for him to hear Saturday after the official announcement.
it is an honor all the former players and coaches have been as excited about as anyone.
“I wouldn’t be at ESPN like I am today without him in my background,” Dykes said.
Sutton was one of the old-style coaches, emphasizing defense constantly. If you watched one of his practices at Arkansas in the 1970’s you wondered if he was aware you had to put the ball in the hole eventually to win.
He knew, Dykes said.
“He was great on both ends of the floor as a coach,” he said Friday morning. “You go watch Bill Self at Kansas and he’s doing some of the same defensive drills that Eddie Sutton did at Oklahoma State with Mr. Iba.”
There were a lot of those interviews in the early years when Sutton referred to those drills under legendary coach Henry Iba in Stillwater during his playing days there from 1955-58 when the Aggies were one of THE blue bloods of college basketball.
They were Oklahoma A&M in those days and the Cowboys nickname came later.
But Dykes pointed out how Sutton adapted what he was doing to what worked as the game evolved.
“The fundamentals of the game defensively have translated to today’s game,” he said. “The game offensively changed and he adjusted to that, but the defense never wavered.”
Teams now still play defense to win. It’s something Eric Musselman has brought a renewed interest in with the Hogs and for an analytics coach, it’s just in the numbers.
“Offensively, Gonzaga was number one team in the country and defensively just outside top 25,” Dykes said about an interesting aspect that was going to play out in the NCAA Tournament this year before being cancelled due to the global health crisis.
“No team in the last 10 years has won a national championship without a top 25 defense,” Dykes said. “I was anxious to see if Gonzaga could have done that this year. If you don’t play defense at a high level you’re not make a deep run or championships.”
The other part Sutton brought to the team was confidence in his ability to coach.
“I can remember a few times we’d be behind at Kentucky and two or three times he would say at halftime he could out-coach the other guy,” Dykes said. “There was never a game we thought we’d get out-coached. It never was even a thought.”
Dykes likes what he’s seen from Mason Jones, especially his ability to score at a clip where he became co-MVP of the SEC this season and gave some of the credit to Musselman.
“Eric did a tremendous job developing him,” he said. “How do we play with freedom, keep the proper spacing and still keep that freedom? Mason was tremendous at that. He could score from anywhere.”
But there are still some things he’s got to improve for the next level.
“He’s still got to develop his body, improve his athleticsm,” Dykes said. “He’s a full 6-5 and has that confidence to get it done. Can he defend, be explosive enough to make those plays at the NBA level?
“The bodies on the floor in the NBA is night and day different from college,” he said.
With all sports cancelled right now, it’s not just fans feeling the frustration.
“The games went away a lot, lot earlier than any of us wanted them to,” Dykes said.
Jones remembers what people said, what he did for Razorbacks
When Mason Jones hit Fayetteville a couple of years ago it didn’t take long to get the story about him being a chubby kid who went to a junior college and re-made himself in a lot of ways.
Aside from losing over 50 pounds, he also turned into a heckuva player and he told Tommy Craft and Tye Richardson on The Morning Rush on ESPN Arkansas on Thursday what he wants Razorback fans to remember.
“I just want Arkansas fans to know that Mason Jones played his hardest every game and he made sure that win or lose, my team knew that we played my hardest and we gave it everything we could game in and game out,” he said in a roughly 20-minute interview. “I just want to leave that Mason Jones was one of the best scorers ever at Arkansas and that he could score at all three levels, knowing people said he wasn’t really athletic.
“(They said) he couldn’t do this and he couldn’t do that, and he proved everybody wrong, and that Mason Jones was a hard worker. He didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, he didn’t let people stop him and he proved people wrong.”
Now fans are wondering if the SEC’s co-MVP this past season will move on to play pro ball or come back and Jones danced on both sides of that issue.
“Right now I’m just taking it day by day,” he said. “There’s a good chance that I’m going to stay in the draft and just take on bigger challenges.”
Then he later left a little crack in the door out of town.
“It’s sweet being the man on campus, but you also have to think about how you want to be remembered,” he said. “Did you leave it all on the court, do you feel like you have anything else to prove, did you show your worth?
“There’s so many little things that go into it … you never know what will happen, but right now I’m just taking it day by day and letting God handle everything.”
The bottom line is he may know but he isn’t saying.
And he talks with Isaiah Joe a lot but he wasn’t letting anything slip about what his decision might be, although most NBA mock drafts have him slotted in a higher position.
“A big decision is coming for my guy Isaiah,” he said. “I just want to let him just make his decision freely. I want him to make the best decision for him.”
One thing that came out clear in the interview, though, was the impact new coach Eric Musselman has had through all this, bringing a pro-style coach to the college game.
“Who wouldn’t want to play hard for a coach who treats you like a pro before you go pro?” Jones said.
