You might want to make sure you have a roster handy watching Arkansas football this year, which might not be the worst thing in the world.
It’s good to remember the time Fordyce native and legendary Alabama coach Paul Bryant once duly noted in 1971 while keeping a change to the Wishbone offense a secret.
After back-to-back 6-5 regular seasons, Bear knew something had to change. He’d flirted with the Miami Dolphins before backing out, but had stumbled onto something in a Bluebonnet Bowl 24-24 tie with Oklahoma.
When the SEC Media gathered in Tuscaloosa and noted the lack of returning starters after maybe Bryant’s three worst seasons, well, he had a ready answer.
“Last thing you want is a bunch of starters coming back from a bad team,” he said.
Chad Morris would never say that publicly after last year’s disastrous 2-10 season, but he could be excused if the thought has crossed his mind a few times.
It may have started back last September after back-to-back collapses against Colorado State and North Texas State.
In the post-mortem after that one, Morris said everybody’s got to start with some accountability, but you could listen to what he wasn’t saying that may be have been even louder.
By that point, he knew he didn’t have a lot of leadership within the team. Some hadn’t bought into his approach and others didn’t appear to have a lot of interest in putting forth the effort that Morris demands.
The result is a roster full of new faces. That happens when some upperclassmen transfer out with remaining eligibility.
Others may have been “encouraged” to look elsewhere for playing time. It’s a good bet Morris and the staff had some pretty blunt assessments of statuses in the end-of-the-year reviews done with each player.
Like Sosa Agim.
A five-star recruit out of Hope, he’d spent three years resembling a three-star with some flashes of what might be.
Morris told him if he wanted to stay with the Hogs, he’s was going to play inside and stop all this wanting to be a defensive end nonsense. If he wasn’t completely committed to doing that, he might want to take his chances in the NFL Draft.
Agim is back, has a new attitude that was obvious in the spring and is clearly doing some mentoring of the incoming freshmen during the summer workouts by all reports.
At quarterback, Morris stumbled through a season making do with what he had and keeping redshirts on freshmen Connor Noland and John Stephen Jones. Turns out it didn’t matter for Noland, who is going with baseball full-time, but it saved a year for Jones.
And he got his first SMU quarterback recruit to transfer to the Hogs and basically become a fifth-year senior who is likely to start and has taken command of the offense from a leadership standpoint.
That was missing last year and it was obvious.
In reality it may have been addition by subtraction with the roster and a crop of incoming freshmen with the potential to be big-time.
Some will want to downplay that by pointing out the negative of the word potential.
Others will use that worn-out babble about lack of experience, but if you look at the recent national championships, the rosters were full of freshmen.
In case you missed it, coaches that compete for championships don’t recruit players that NEED to be developed to be come winners.
They recruit winners to be developed into championship contenders.
Morris is still got some distance to go before there’s any talk of competing for even an SEC West championship. That does automatically put you in the national title conversation, by the way.
But that’s the goal.
And he’s hoping it’s off to a good start with this class.
