Arkansas wide receiver La’Michael Pettway talked with the media after Wednesday’s practice about how the group is coming along and who has looked good in the workouts and scrimmage.
Gibson on offense’s development after practice inside Wednesday
Offensive lineman Johnny Gibson talked with the media after Wednesday’s indoor practice that gave the players a break in preparation for Saturday’s scrimmage.
Storey just working on what he can improve in his play
Hogs quarterback Ty Storey wasn’t getting into comparisons on the quarterback competition and is only focused on his performance as well as getting the offense smoother.
Kelley talking about quarterback competition
Cole Kelley is one of the five quarterbacks competing for the starting job with the Razorbacks and he talked about that and how the offense is speeding up after practice Wednesday.
Bud Light Morning Rush Podcast: Wednesday
John and Tommy are joined by former Arkansas QB Tyler Wilson as they talk about another day of fall camp, taking criticism on the field, WHAT’s YOUR BEEF WEDNESDAY and more!
Embracing rainy weather, no answers from Morris … yet
You get the idea from Chad Morris that no matter what the weather, he’s going to wish it would get worse than what it is.
That’s a change.
With a multi-million dollar indoor workout facility, Morris uses it for warmup. Then he gets the team out into the elements, no matter what they are.
That, folks, is old school.
To me that’s something that’s been missing in college athletics, but then again I came up in an era where that was the normal way coaches did things.
In spring practice when it was cold and rainy, Morris said he wished it was colder and the rain coming down harder. When it was hot starting fall practice he wanted it hotter.
The little fit he threw early in Monday’s practice didn’t appear to surprise the players and Morris might have been waiting for it.
“I had to push a little yesterday, but that’s okay,” Morris told the media Tuesday. “That’s to be expected.”
We suspected he was counting on it. I’ve had many Hall of Fame coaches tell me for 40 years their little fits in practice are close to being orchestrated. The truth is they’ve planned it and it’s part of the psychology all winning football coaches use in a manner professional psychiatrists admire.
“You can tell a lot about a football team by how they respond,” he said Tuesday. “Yesterday, the energy was very low and it was evident when they came out of the locker room.”
As he said, he was expecting it.
“I was waiting on that day to come,” Morris said. “I didn’t know when it was going to be here, but it showed up yesterday and it was evident. It was evident when they came out of the locker room.”
The guess here is he knew fairly quickly the time had come.
“That’s not our style,” he said. “That’s not what we’re about. We challenged them really hard yesterday.”
It’s a good thing they picked it up or they might have been on that practice field until the lights came on. It was not uncommon for old-school coaches years ago. They simply stopped practice, went back to warming up and starting it all over again, regardless of the period things dropped off.
“We were going to get our 22 periods of work in,” Morris said. “Now that might have taken us six hours to get it in, but we were going to get it in regardless. My message was you either push or I will.”
Morris got the response he was wanting.
“They responded well today and I was excited about that,” he said Tuesday. “Had much better energy today. That was good to see. We’re obviously making some progress, but we’ve still gotta keep pushing. We’ve got a long way to go.”
That’s because things change dramatically next week. The coaches’ contact will be restricted again.
“This is essentially the last week of camp before we break and get into school mode next week,” Morris said. “We’ve still got a lot of work today between now and our scrimmage on Saturday.”
Remember, I don’t think Morris’ “long way to go” is a reference to just breaking even in wins and losses. He’s talking about being ready to compete for championships. He told us that was the goal in his very first press conference back in December when he was hired.
“The guys are moving in the right direction,” he said. “I’ve been pleased with the progress of some of our young guys.”
But he’s still dancing all around the question of who the quarterback is going to be on this team.
That’s the biggest question Razorback fans always have.
And Morris isn’t giving up anything, citing positives for all of them on Tuesday and even throwing walk-on Jack Lindsey into the mix and why he was held back in Saturday’s scrimmage.
“No separation,” he said when asked if anyone was stepping up after Saturday’s scrimmage.
In that scrimmage, freshmen Connor Noland, John Stephen Jones and redshirt freshman Daulton Hyatt were full live contact. Ty Storey, Cole Kelley and Lindsey were not.
Lindsey was held back not necessarily for the quarterback battle, which is rather congested right now.
“He’s an older guy,” Morris said Tuesday. “Obviously, he’s holding for us (on kick placements) and he was going to be in some live field goal situations, but as far as putting him back there at quarterback and making him live, he’s an older guy that understands the offense and with him being our starting holder we just didn’t want to take a chance on him.”
Morris stressed again his offense is a two-back, run-oriented offense that will take shots down the field. That two-back set he refers to is just about always a quarterback and running back.
The knee-jerk reaction when he was hired was that his offense would be flinging it around like during the Bobby Petrino days of 2010-11.
Nope.
With five running backs he likes and a scheme that creates running lanes, you get the idea Morris is going to be running the ball a lot more than people think. He wants to have a lot of plays, but he wants it equally divided between run and pass.
“It’s who we are,” Morris said. “We’re going to run the football.”
Like we’ve said, he’s more of an old-school football coach than maybe Arkansas has seen in at least a decade. In the way he handles players maybe go back a couple of more decades.
You see that in the way he embraces bad weather.
“Any time you can put them in those type of situations and conditions and see how they respond, that’s what it’s about,” he said of the rain that was heavy at times. “You couldn’t have scripted a better day today.”
Right now rain is in the forecast through Monday next week with the exception of Thursday.
He may get some more chances to work in wet weather.
And, as always, he’ll probably wish it would rain harder.
Morris didn’t like rain stopping at end Tuesday
Arkansas coach Chad Morris said after practice he wished the rain would have been harder as he kept the team outside during the downpour, which didn’t let up until the end.
Easley returns to Razorbacks as volunteer assistant coach
FAYETTEVILLE — Shana Easley, a four-year starter behind the plate for Arkansas from 2003-06, is set to return to Fayetteville as the program’s volunteer assistant with Tuesday’s announcement from coach Courtney Deifel.
Easley has spent the past six seasons at the helm of the Northern Colorado program.
In her final season with the Bears, Easley led her team to a 28-28 record and a spot in the 2018 Big Sky Championship title game.
During her tenure at Northern Colorado, Easley was named the 2014 Big Sky Coach of the Year, collected 110 wins and guided her players to 13 All-Big Sky honors.
Easley’s teams also excelled in the classroom with more than 60 Big Sky All-Academic Team accolades while Lauren Paige became the program’s first Academic All-American in 2018.
Prior to joining Northern Colorado, Easley spent four years as an assistant coach at UMKC. With Easley on staff, the ‘Roos played their way to the Summit League regular-season championship in 2011 with a spot in the conference tournament final that same year.
During her time with Kansas City, Easley coached 11 all-conference performers including the league Player and Pitcher of the Year in 2011.
Behind a standout career as Arkansas’ catcher, Easley still ranks among the program’s career top five in fielding percentage, chances, putouts and runners caught stealing.
In her senior year, Easley led the team in home runs and total bases. In the classroom, she was a four-time member of the SEC Academic Honor Roll.
The Loveland, Colorado, native graduated from Arkansas in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing and spent the 2007 and 2008 seasons on Arkansas’ staff as graduate assistant and director of operations.
The program earned a trip to the NCAA Tournament in 2008.
Easley played two seasons of professional softball, beginning that phase of her softball career with the Arizona Heat of the National Pro Fastpitch league in 2006.
She continued her playing days with Reggio Emilia in Italy the following season.
Bud Light Morning Rush Podcast: Tuesday
John and Tommy discuss Frank Broyles, news around the SEC, interview Arkansas Associate AD Kevin Trainor about “Frank Broyles, Arkansas Legend” and more!
Morris gets players’ attention early in Monday’s practice
It didn’t take Chad Morris long to finally get the Razorbacks’ attention at Monday morning’s practice.
“You push or I will!,” Morris yelled as he called the players together just a period or two into the practice. “I got all day! I don’t like your attitude!”
He then had the players do up-down drills. If you don’t know what that is, it’s exactly what it says. The players get up, run in place, then drop down flat on the ground, get up and do it until someone says you can stop.
It caught most of us in the media by surprise. That was a scene I saw a few times when Lou Holtz was coaching the Hogs, but not much — if any — in between.
The best way I can put it is Morris showed he’s an old-school coach. I remember coaches yelling they were going to run players until they puked or passed out … whichever came first.
But that was 40 years or so ago. I’m old enough to remember when the coaches told you to run through a wall, you said, “Yes sir!” and headed for the wall. Hopefully you could remember the helmet. Not anymore.
The Hogs on Monday, quite frankly, didn’t appear that surprised.
“People were walking around,” cornerback Ryan Pulley said. “We knew we were going to get punished at some time or another … we just took it to the chin and we just got better today.”
It was a change from the previous regime that appeared to me at times to be supervising recess at playschool.
“We didn’t address it like that,” tight end Austin Cantrell said.
It’s all part of the change that Morris is trying to instill. He doesn’t just talk about playing fast and playing tough.
“I think the biggest difference between the old staff and the new one is the emphasis on the culture that we’re trying to build,” Cantrell said. “It’s not that coach B (Bret Bielema) didn’t emphasize it, but, I mean, it’s every day with coach Morris. We’re pounding it. It all starts with a good foundation.”
“The physical scrimmage and coming off of the off day, the energy wasn’t there,” linebacker De’Jon Harris said. “Even in the walk-through’s and warming up.”
Morris didn’t appear too happy after Saturday’s scrimmage where the offense ran nearly 200 plays by everybody’s guestimation.
“To get tougher we’ve gotta practice tougher,” he said.
You get the idea Morris, who looks more and more like the old-school high school football coach he probably is, would love to resort to some of the tough tactics.
He would probably be the type to do what Bobby Bowden did at Florida State after they opened in the 1988 season in Miami ranked No. 1 and got kicked sideways by the sixth-ranked Hurricanes, 31-0.
Infuriated on the plane ride back to Tallahassee immediately after the night game that was carried live on CBS on the Saturday before Labor Day, Bowden decided to get his team’s attention.
“We drove straight to the stadium, coach Bowden had the players put on those wet uniforms and we scrimmaged,” said Max Howell, who was on Bowden’s staff then. He worked with the secondary that meant he basically made sure Deion Sanders and Leroy Butler were comfortable, but not after getting back to Tallahassee.
“We scrimmaged until the sun came up on Sunday morning,” Howell said. “But we didn’t lose another game.”
The Seminoles finished third in the nation, behind Miami and Notre Dame, when Holtz got his only national championship.
Morris can’t do that now. NCAA rules simply don’t allow things like that.
But you get the idea there could be a situation where he would.
“We’ve got to continue to push ’em,” he said after Saturday’s scrimmage. “We’ve got to continue to push harder in practice.”
It’s a good bet nobody is doubting now he was serious.
Agim getting most of his practice reps at tackle
Razorbacks defensive lineman McTelvin Agim told the media Monday most of his reps in practice are coming inside at tackle, but he is seeing a little more time out at end.
