What Bielema can’t or won’t say at press conference
Monday it’s time for Bret Bielema to face the media again.
This time, however, he will have the advantage of being able to see Arkansas’ latest meltdown and analyze the film.
And the odds are good we’ll hear how close this team is to something that hasn’t really been clearly defined yet.
Here’s exactly where this time is right now:
• Winless in the SEC (0-4)
• Winless against Power 5 opponents through seven games. Yes, over halfway through the season this team does not have a win over a Power 5 opponent.
• Mounting injuries (running back Chase Hayden is likely done for the year).
• Questions continuing to mount about Bielema’s ability to actually get this program out of the miserable quagmire it has been stuck in for nearly a year now.
• Facing four SEC opponents in it’s final five games and needing to win four of those final five just to get into ANY sort of bowl game.
Yes, that’s the depths to which Arkansas football has sank.
Nobody is going to say it’s an impossible situation, but that word is on the tip of every Razorback fans’ tongue.
“This is unchartered waters for me,” he said Saturday night after Auburn dismantled the Hogs for the second year in a row, 52-20.
Bielema has continued to look completely lost and bewildered as the losses continue to mount. It’s almost like he has no idea what to say, do or expect.
In a way you can understand that. He never had to deal with this at Wisconsin.
For four years he kept telling anyone that would listen that he basically was shooting for the fifth year.
“It’s time to raise the bar,” he said before the season started.
So he knows what the expectations were. He knew the implications of what he was facing. Instead of stepping up and saying early on this was going to be a team where a lot of things had to fall exactly right just to match the previous seasons, he continues to think a miracle is going to come along.
Luck, which is what he’s been counting on, hasn’t kicked in. Bielema used up more luck than most coaches get in a career in the 2015 season.
Now he’s going back to where he kept rolling sevens in that 2015 season. From the Henry Heave to Austin Allen getting a 2-point conversion to block Ole Miss from going to Atlanta and the SEC Championship game to getting about 12 different breaks against Tennessee, Arkansas managed to make it to the Liberty Bowl.
And everybody was excited, which may have been the most alarming aspect of the whole thing.
How far has the Hog Nation fallen when getting to the Liberty Bowl is considered a major accomplishment?
Bielema came in guns blazing in December 2012 and all he’s done with that is shoot himself in the foot repeatedly while hitting the occasional bullseye and selling fans on things are getting better.
Quite frankly it’s started to sound like loser’s talk. It’s gotten worse lately.
I’m sure we’ll hear today about how this one play, that one play against Auburn could have made a difference. How this one player just made a mistake and if he’s been six inches farther along it would have been different.
When you deduct the coachspeak from everything Bielema says you’re left with a coach that’s trying to make the reasons this team is so bad sound like close misses.
He can’t tell the truth at this point.
That truth is he can’t recruit the type players necessary to win the SEC. There’s no one else to blame for the talent level after five recruiting cycles.
He can’t say that he lost every good assistant coach he had. There are no answers why folks like Jim Chaney and Sam Pittman left, only to wind up at Georgia, who is now the hottest team in the league outside of Tuscaloosa.
No, he can’t point the finger at athletics director Jeff Long about not having the budget to have even a moderate-size support staff (where there is no limit and Alabama has something like 48 people on the support staff that are never near practice).
That’s the modern-day requirement to win games in the SEC. Guys who do nothing but analyze every minute detail, including scouting potential recruits four and five years away from them being eligible to sign.
Bielema won’t mention any of that. Not that he’s likely more aware of it than anyone else.
If you didn’t know better, you’d swear he acts like a guy that knows what day he’s going to hit the Lottery jackpot.
Which, at the present pace, may be soon after Thanksgiving.
How does Jeffrey handle this mess he created?
Jeffrey P. Long has been conspicuous by his absence lately.
Of course, he does have obligations to the College Football Playoff committee he serves on. It officially starts in a couple of weeks, but he does have to keep up now. Watching Arkansas football these days might throw off the depth perception, so to speak, for choosing the four best teams at the end of the year.
As the Razorbacks’ football train continued to careen further off course, Jeffrey hasn’t bothered to be seen a lot around Razorback Stadium.
Saturday night’s debacle at the stadium was a disjointed mess. High winds apparently prevented the parachute landings (or else they tried and ended up in Rogers). There was supposed to be a flyover, but that didn’t happen, either. Those have been messed up due to the construction cranes in the north end zone.
And, yet, Jeffrey stays in the background and silent. He says publicly not winning hurts and nobody wants to win more than he does.
Apparently not. Oh, I’m sure he WANTS to win, but he’s made it clear it’s not a priority.
In case you’re wondering, some on the board of trustees have noticed.
Some on Saturday night were placing the blame squarely in Jeffrey’s lap. Oh, it was probably the heat of the moment so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
After all, they are the ones who let things get this far out of shape.
The Hogs are 27-31 just past the halfway point of the Bret Bielema Era and 10-26 in the SEC. This is fast becoming the worst tenure in Razorback football in the last 60 years.
Maybe that’s what Bielema keeps referring to when he says they “are close” to something nobody can figure out.
We’ve already spelled out that Jeffrey should have seen this coming. Anybody who did more than look at Bielema’s won-loss record at Wisconsin could have seen this coming.
As I said in 2012, this was not a home run hire. The national media folks saying that weren’t looking behind the record and doing any in-depth thought, which is normally the case.
Bielema was a band-aid, at best.
Most would have had questions after a two-year record of 10-15 and 2-14 in the SEC. Instead, Bielema got a raise and an extension. After year three, he was 18-23 overall and 7-17 in the league.
Charlie Strong got fired at Texas with the same overall winning percentage his first three years and a better winning percentage in his league.
But that’s at Texas, where winning football games is important.
What hasn’t been pointed out to anyone is that all those Director’s Cup points (whatever in the world that means) doesn’t, well, generate the cash that a winning football team does.
Especially in the Southeastern Conference.
Ask Alabama. Nick Saban gets paid $11 million a year because revenues and enrollment at the University have leaped into the stratosphere and most of the credit has been given to the increased publicity of the football team.
Greg Byrne, the athletics director at Alabama, is all about winning. He was at Mississippi State and fired Sylvester Croom as the coach, who had about the exact same winning percentage as Bielema in the SEC.
At nearly every other school in the league, winning is important.
When Jeffrey tries to sell folks that an athletic department is more than the football team, he’s seriously — hilariously — wrong when you’re in the SEC. Unless you’re Kentucky that counters that with a national basketball program, but they will fire a coach that doesn’t win football games.
All the babbling he does about academics and overall sports teams improving is what he’s good at — yammering on and saying nothing of substance. Actually, it’s risen just about everywhere because of new NCAA mandates. It’s not just Arkansas.
In the SEC, your athletic department is as good as your football team (or basketball team at Kentucky). It affects your new enrollments, it affects the bottom line of the entire university.
At Arkansas, apparently no one seems to grasp that concept. Instead, they focus on making it easier and more affordable for Texas kids to go to the University of Arkansas than schools in their own state.
The citizens of Arkansas are told enrollment is up, things are great and all is well.
Jeffrey stood in front of a crowd at the Little Rock Touchdown Club and said so many absurdly ridiculous things it was impossible to list them all. But he did say Arkansas is not a “win at all cost” program.
Which is obviously true. Some took that to mean violating NCAA rules. Jeffrey allowed that perception to stand, but the guess here is he was telling the truth and he wasn’t talking about NCAA rules.
No, he was talking about devoting the resources to allow coaches to win at the big time level. The Hogs simply don’t have as many support personnel in football or other sports as teams competing for championships.
Which now is the root cause for Jeffrey’s mess.
How — and when — he cleans up this mess will speak volumes about an athletics director that has proven to be less of a leader than concerned about his glorified title of something called vice chancellor or whatever.
He has said he doesn’t like to make midseason changes. That made sense until the NCAA put in an early signing period for football that starts this December.
If it had been in place in 2012, Bielema would have had 10 days before that early signing period.
Which makes things ticklish as Jeffrey tries to figure out how to clean up his mess. There’s no data to work with.
The fair thing to the players, whom Jeffrey says are the most important part of his job, is to not have them commit to a coach that’s going to be fired before signing day. That creates an optic that could backfire.
But it’s something he’s got to work through. He can say what he wants about waiting to see how the season plays out, but all that’s going to do is increase the noise around him.
Well, that’s assuming he says ANYTHING.
He hasn’t in awhile.
Things I think I know: Week Eight
What else can we say?
Arkansas is the worst team in the SEC West and maybe in the conference.
They don’t have talent. They are very poorly coached.
It’s a mess.
Here are some uncommon numbers about Razorback football against power 5 opponents this season.
- Arkansas is 107th in the nation at stopping the run, allowing 6.15 yards per carry.
- Arkansas’ defense is 50{e1768d0eec022f908d772ba0c0274d97d05d220b4341147789bdb671ddb19707} on 3rd down.
- Arkansas is 120th in America in sacks allowed.
- Arkansas is 0-18 when trailing at the half under Bret Bielema, who has now presided over three different 0-4 starts in SEC play at Arkansas, which is also a record.
- Arkansas is 66th in the country at rushing the football.
In short, they stink.
You know who is good? Penn State.
They whooped that overrated tool Jim Harbaugh Saturday night and I hope we get to see Penn State face Alabama in the playoff. You can go ahead and put Saquon Barkley in the Heisman, as old Dale would say.
Arkansas has a better football program then Kansas. The Jayhawks put up 21 yards of offense in a 43-0 beating at the hands of TCU.
I donn’t think LSU’s Derrius Guice will play in the 4th quarter of the Arkansas game.
Next week’s Arkansas-Ole Miss game should be shown to prisoners to get them to confess where to find leaders of ISIS.
I am still not buying Miami, even though I think Mark Richt is the man. Wouldn’t it be something if Miami made the playoff and had to face…..Georgia?
Butch Jones can go ahead and book a moving truck from the company of his choice for the day after the season ends.
I think it’s 70-30 Bielema is gone at the end of the year.
And finally, Montana Tech beat Montana State-Northern in NAIA action 93-19.
That’s right, 93-19!
It was 66-0 at halftime!
Montana Tech rolled up 932 yards of offense in the game.
And you thought Arkansas had problems?
