If Alabama is its King Kong, a point that hardly can be disputed, Arkansas has become the Pluto of Southeastern Conference football.
Barely visible, sometimes forgotten, irrelevant to serious conversation regarding college football's evil empire (to the non-SEC world) in what for the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville amounts to the Lean Teens.
Razorback fans can't even kick around the Kansas Jayhawks these days, once as reflexive as scratching one's head or punting on fourth and 10. Kansas managed its third victory of the season on Saturday, one more than Arkansas has mustered. That it came against TCU, one of Arkansas' former Southwest Conference rivals, did not escape attention.
Nor that Kansas athletics is now under the watch of a former Arkansas athletic director, Jeff Long, who two days after a thudding home loss to TCU last year regaled the Little Rock Touchdown Club with UA's graduation rates. Seen as a potential obstacle to the firing of faltering Bret Bielema, Long himself was excised in a November purge that included his fifth-year football coach.
Arkansas can get things done almost anywhere athletically, it seems, except on the football field. It's on the gridiron that the Razorbacks, a national power in football as late as 2011, have gone off the tracks. These days, the Hogs are plugged into 11 a.m. CT kickoffs, a sticking point for some but that can be corrected with a better football team. Not even the Fayetteville presence of defending national champion and top-ranked Alabama on a recent October Saturday could get the Razorbacks off the cartoon hour.
Arkansas games generally end in midafternoon, the salad portion of a main-course dinner in present-day college football. They have been played lately in home stadiums before fans conditioned to defeat, most leaving well before the head coaches shake hands at midfield. All that's left then is for the score to crawl across the TV screen while fans across the country wonder aloud, "I never thought things would get this bad at Arkansas."
Substitute Nebraska or Tennessee or USC for Arkansas and you get some idea of what's going on nationally. Those teams and others frequently appear in the USA Today "Misery Index," which author Dan Wolken calls "a weekly measurement of knee-jerk reactions based on what each fan base just watched."
Deriving some inspiration for writing, he says, from this corner while attending Lakeside High School, Dan sharpened his skills at Vanderbilt University. (He gets less national exposure than another Vandy journalism grad, but unlike Skip Bayless doesn't think himself above the action.) In virtual training for his present job, he saw bad football on a regular basis at Vanderbilt, long an entry-level job in college football's coaching hierarchy.
Vanderbilt has had modest success in the sport, sending some players to the pros (quarterback Jay Cutler comes to mind) and sometimes successful enough to play in a bowl game. The alma mater of World Series hero David Price, on the west end of Nashville, Tenn., which sees itself as "Athens of the South," Vanderbilt has been long regarded as the Harvard of the SEC. Academics over athletics, in other words.
Thus with some chagrin did Razorback fans absorb Saturday's 45-31 Fayetteville loss to Vanderbilt, which gashed 444 yards against a John Chavis-coordinated defense. Running back Ke'Shawn Vaughn, wide receiver Kalija Lipscomb and tight end Jared Pinkney totaled 310 yards, scoring five of Vandy's six touchdowns. Arkansas had trouble in particular with Vaughn, whose 63-yard pop on Vanderbilt's opening drive of the game made it 7-7.
Vanderbilt led, 21-14, at halftime and pushed it to 45-24 before Arkansas, a home underdog in a matchup of 0-4 SEC teams, punched across a late touchdown. It was the kind of score that might have rendered an "Oh, my!" from the late Paul Eells, a veteran broadcaster at Vanderbilt before becoming an Arkansas legend.
First-year Arkansas coach Chad Morris, whose patience may have run out, didn't mince words: "We didn't play well enough. You get what you deserve and we didn't deserve to win."
With three games left in the season, Razorback fans talk wistfully of how a transferring Kelly Bryant, recruited to Clemson by Morris, could change things in 2019. Though upgraded wide receivers and offensive linemen would help, it's becoming clear that as quarterbacks go, it doesn't matter whether Ty Storey, Cole Kelley or Connor Noland, who have gotten most of the work, is calling signals for this team.
Morris' decision to punt on fourth-and-three from the Vandy 39 in the first quarter summed up this season like an epigram. Fans who drag themselves out for early-bird kickoffs should expect the head coach to show some backbone, especially in a lost season such as this. But then, I don't remember hearing any recent comparisons between Morris and Bobby Petrino as an offensive play-caller.
The Hogs' problems defensively against Vanderbilt, said linebacker De'Jon Harris, amounted to "playing with bad eyes." Playaction fakes left Arkansas vulnerable to screen passes, often to running back Khari Blasingame.
"They schemed us up pretty well," said Harris, who along with junior end McTelvin Agim is having a good season. "The only screens we had seen were the slow screens to the running back."
For a team from not much was expected, not much has been received. Arkansas has beaten only Eastern Illinois and Tulsa, wafer-like snacks for even this squad. More than a year has elapsed since Arkansas last beat a Power Five team, 38-37, at Ole Miss after trailing the Rebels, 31-7. With LSU, Mississippi State and Missouri yet to be played, the prospect of the first 10-loss season in Razorback football appears increasingly real.
But at least, ex-Hog Andrew Benintendi can show off his World Series ring the next time he visits Baum Stadium.
Sports on 10/30/2018