In today’s world of need for immediate satisfaction, Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek allowed other names to make repeated headlines, then quietly got the guy he wanted all along.
Georgia associate head coach and offensive line coach Sam Pittman is going to be the one to step up to fix the mess that Razorback football now finds itself.
Fans were in a mounting tizzy for the last week that built to a boiling-over stage as Lane Kiffin accepted the Ole Miss job, but just as we saw in the search that landed Eric Musselman back in April there’s a new way these things go.
Yurachek and his trusty sidekick Jon Fagg were the main two people in charge of things and there weren’t many leaks that turned out to be very accurate. Some are saying they actually had things pretty much resolved Wednesday.
While people were tracking planes and reading every change in wind direction, everybody had a source and they were pointing in several directions at once.
Nobody was doing much talking and letting all of the rumors and whirlwind of gossip just go unanswered until the news broke Sunday that Pittman suddenly was the name at the top of the list.
Once again Yurachek proved to lay down enough false trails everybody was running in circles, often colliding as one source after another proved to be completely wrong. Arkansas may have known all along Kiffin wanted Ole Miss, who knee-jerked and fired their coach to win the headlines.
Pittman was busy. He was trying to stay focused on the Bulldogs winning an SEC championship and finding a way into the College Football Playoff.
After LSU thumped the Bulldogs in the SEC Championship game Saturday, the guess here is things with Pittman heated up fairly quickly.
While fans blasted everybody from the Board of Trustees to the media, even some in the media were critical although we may never really know how things actually played out for the past couple of weeks … unless Yurachek tells us.
Pittman, though, may have been as good of a choice all along as Yurachek could have made. He didn’t have to win the headline. No, Arkansas football needs a coach who can put things back together again.
During a three-year term in Fayetteville under Bret Bielema, he built an offensive line that got national attention.
But his frustration with Bielema’s halfway approach to things finally got to be too much and when Kirby Smart offered him the chance to come to Georgia he didn’t waste a lot of time getting there.
Pittman will take over a program that has fallen into the worst period in history, going 4-20 over the last two seasons without an SEC win.
He knows all this.
And, we’re hearing, it’s basically been a done deal since Wednesday of last week. That means in our day and age where too many fans want affirmation over information, a lot of people were turning their wishes into guesses that suddenly became fact.
The fact is it’s now Pittman as the coach. Rehashing history at this point doesn’t do a whole lot of good. It is what it is. All that should matter is the players will be ready to jump on a grenade for Pittman within five minutes of meeting him.
And I’m sick to death of folks throwing up he doesn’t have head coaching experience. For every successful head coach experienced taking over a new job I’ll show you one that bombed, despite success elsewhere.
Then I’d point out there’s been some pretty good head coaches that were never even a coordinator. There are three coaches in the CFP in their first head coaching job.
In the end, all that will matter is how many games Pittman can win as a head coach at Arkansas.
