When the sun didn’t come up in Northwest Arkansas on Sunday morning, some fans may have taken it as a sign following Arkansas’ stunning 31-24 loss to San Jose State on Saturday night.
Yes, things have fallen to that.
According to some folks that follow such things, there are threads on message boards asking for the heads of everybody in the football department all the way to cleaning out the administration and even the Razorback Foundation.
That ain’t gonna happen, folks.
Despite what many fans think, it’s doubtful anybody’s going anywhere. I don’t think there are many that are of the frame of mind to be paying two coaches NOT to coach the Razorbacks at the same time.
Plus, it would make hiring just about anybody impossible.
Chad Morris knows how bad things are. He was about as agitated as he’s been with the Hogs when he came to the post-mortem after the loss Saturday night.
“It was very disappointing, extremely disappointing,” he said.
That may have been the understatement of the night. Morris is very guarded in what he says with the media, won’t throw individual players publicly under the bus and certainly not assistant coaches.
Privately, we’ve heard, he’s not quite so shy.
“Everyone’s going to be held accountable, from me down,” he said. “I am going to hold every coach, every player, every staff member accountable.”
That means, simply, it’s not going to be a very pleasant couple of days around the football center.
In the nearly 60 years I can remember around Arkansas football, the blame game has followed an order, regardless of who was in charge that goes head coach, quarterback and athletics director.
True to form, it’s still following that method, although in all honesty many fans are quiet about the quarterback issue because they don’t know WHO should be out there.
Morris made it very clear Saturday night he never considered changing quarterbacks and, quite frankly, shouldn’t. He spent last season and the first couple of games this year flip-flopping on that and it usually works better sticking with one.
Yes, Nick Starkel had a horrific night trying to force a play instead of taking the one in front of him. There were occasions he threw over a wide open receiver to go downfield.
“We’ve got to play within the system, take what they give us and we can’t force everything,” Morris said. “He forced some balls tonight, I thought he pressed a little bit and that was uncharacteristic. He did not do that the week before.”
The best case scenario in the autopsy of Saturday night’s loss is Starkel and everybody learned a lesson.
“Yeah, at the end of the day, I wasn’t good enough tonight,” Starkel said.
He wasn’t being flippant about it. He knows exactly what he did wrong, admitting he tried to force throws where he shouldn’t have.
What he didn’t mention was why he repeated the action. Despite what many fans are probably thinking today, the coaches aren’t stark idiots. Morris personally was in his face a couple of times on the sidelines and offensive coordinator Joe Craddock bent his ear on the phones.
It almost makes you wonder if there wasn’t a certain amount of Starkel trying to overcome what he felt were other issues.
“It wasn’t just that, we’ve got to keep him clean too,” Morris said. “We’ve got to be able to be effective in running the football. We threw the ball 50 times tonight.
“That is entirely too many.”
Now the inevitable second-guessing begins in earnest and will continue for awhile.
When he was hired, Morris asked for a chance and promised he wouldn’t let the fans down.
Do fans believe he’s already failed on that promise?
