The Elephant in the Room Part II

[piglosopher]

From what I seen on this team...yeah, this is Pittman's last year. Unless we win out sans the Bama game.

No reason to gloat or be happy about it. None of us wanted this. I like the guy and he made our program respectable again. Think we all agree there. He has my gratitude and appreciation so much for that because it was a legitimate question if we were drifting in SMU death penalty waters. He was the right guy to stop the bleeding and bring pride back to the program, and the job now is much more attractive thanks to him.

But this is the SEC. It's not a nice guy league. The feel good story of the an assistant coming home and getting his dream job is over.

Need a guy that has a killer instinct like so many of our rivals and competitors. That wants to make the other team regret for ever stepping on the field. It's what it takes to survive

[HOGSRUNWILD]

The Mike Anderson analogy is perfect, minus the prior head coaching experience.

They both took the programs when they were a laughingstock and made them respectable.  They just both have a ceiling, for different reasons, that mean they will never get to where we want to get.  we can appreciate what they did and i always will, but I can also see that we can and should do better.

Sam behaving like a little bitch about the internet and then having the team come out and lay and egg sure didn't make me like him more though.

[TC]

The Mike Anderson analogy is perfect, minus the prior head coaching experience.

They both took the programs when they were a laughingstock and made them respectable.  They just both have a ceiling, for different reasons, that mean they will never get to where we want to get.  we can appreciate what they did and i always will, but I can also see that we can and should do better.

Sam behaving like a little bitch about the internet and then having the team come out and lay and egg sure didn't make me like him more though.

That entire squad is shellshocked after they put in all that work (the wrong kind apparently), and it fell apart so suddenly. I'd expect him to go into protection mode to "protect the guys." I know I would. That's what the "we've got some good keeds" is about. Deleting his twitter acct was a bitch move for sure. He should've just stopped reading it instead of going passive aggressive wife mode.

My hope is that it ends amicably, because we're the king of ugly break ups. I think Yuri has the chops to figure out an out for Sam and make the separation as painless as possible. Hopefully.

Now if he somehow pulls a rabbit out of his ass and beats Bama, and the next game has How Do You Like Me Now blasting thru the speakers during pregame, he can fuck right off forever.

[obijuana]

Was Pitt hired because no one wanted the job, or because he was cheap? Either way it's a big problem.

Unless the PTB pony up and offer more than a "competitive" wage, we'll end up with another unproven project.

[hit_that_line]

This has been the point that I've never understood how it evades the Petrino haters.  And there were and still are many. 

Every year we got better.  Every...single...year.

No coach we have ever had can say the same thing. 

Yet, Petrino haters said and continue to say that we were going to start declining had Petrino stayed. 

Fuck the PTB that fired the greatest coach we have ever had. 

The 2010 team was better than 2011. The recruiting was just horrific plus inability to hire quality assistants. It would have ended like his last stay at Louisville. Look at his last couple recruiting classes here. The next hire will be critical. League is in flux and the right guy can turn it around quickly with NIL/portal. Amazing how fast things changed here with Sam. Everyone thought we were a tough, gritty bunch his first two years. Now we're the softest team I've ever seen.

[bigpig]

We're about one loss away from Sam coming out of the tunnel arm in arm with his players. That's always how you know a coach is donezo

[hit_that_line]

We're about one loss away from Sam coming out of the tunnel arm in arm with his players. That's always how you know a coach is donezo

He'll be calling us all slaps before too long. "They're drinking that haterade, men!! You gotta play for me!"

[Trigger7672]

Alright which one of you is this??

https://x.com/noahdarling_/status/1708231373645860995?s=46&t=lD8yygcF-k5I6Qnx3SfeHw

[hit_that_line]

Someone needs to knock over those fucking pig statues.

[animal]

I tend to agree Petrino's 2011 team wouldn't have been the raving success everyone thought it would be. That being said it's impossible to quantify what that means exactly. That team was full of fucking quit and they had good reason to. Would you want to play hard for a university that wrongly fired the best fucking thing that's happened to it in decades? Not only that but they replaced him with his grandpa mentor that literally told everyone he was there to collect a check, wave his hat, and not do a damn thing else. We would have been better off with Taver Johnson or Paul Haynes or whatever his name was as the interim all season but that's ancient history now and Bobby is only coming back to kick our asses and be that reminder of how we Arkansucked the shit out of that deal.


Moving forward this thing is a case where these coaches continue to make egregious errors replacing OG staffers. The OG staff's of most of these hires are generally not bad at all. When those coaches move on and are replaced with budget friendly coaches things start to fall apart in a hurry...that's why we are replacing head coaches on an average of every 4 years. When replacing both coordinators in the same off-season you are playing with fire and now we are getting burned.

You take our line coach when Sam was hired. Brad Davis is widely regarded as one of the best. This Kennedy dude...nobody has heard of and in any case neither guy pissed a drop in recruiting here. This Kennedy guy might as well be that slug Bert hired out of Michigan. Actually I'm not so sure he wasn't better. We are recruiting guys that other programs wanted but they aren't being developed unless you count getting put on your back as being "developed".

Watching that Notre Dame line with their tackles tossing DEs aside like they were rag dolls last night...holy shit how far down the rung are we.

[RazorB]

Players from the 2012 team have admitted they took it easy and there were virtually no volunteer practices after Petrino's firing. Their practices were night and day with John L Smith.

That's mainly why that team lost.

[Trigger7672]

I don't know why we have to constantly rehash the Petrino shit over a decade later. It's like Godwin's law, it's only a matter of time before we start arguing about Petrino around here after a bad loss in football.

[hit_that_line]

Players from the 2012 team have admitted they took it easy and there were virtually no volunteer practices after Petrino's firing. Their practices were night and day with John L Smith.

That's mainly why that team lost.

And the fact the OL was awful. Both starting LB's were done early. That team was gonna be a mess.

[BleedinRed]

The Mike Anderson analogy is perfect, minus the prior head coaching experience.

They both took the programs when they were a laughingstock and made them respectable.  They just both have a ceiling, for different reasons, that mean they will never get to where we want to get.  we can appreciate what they did and i always will, but I can also see that we can and should do better.

Sam behaving like a little bitch about the internet and then having the team come out and lay and egg sure didn't make me like him more though.

I don't know why we have to constantly rehash the Petrino shit over a decade later. It's like Godwin's law, it's only a matter of time before we start arguing about Petrino around here after a bad loss in football.

Because all we do is have bad fucking losses.  The program has sucked ass for 10 years.  

[Feral]

From what I seen on this team...yeah, this is Pittman's last year. Unless we win out sans the Bama game.

No reason to gloat or be happy about it. None of us wanted this. I like the guy and he made our program respectable again. Think we all agree there. He has my gratitude and appreciation so much for that because it was a legitimate question if we were drifting in SMU death penalty waters. He was the right guy to stop the bleeding and bring pride back to the program, and the job now is much more attractive thanks to him.

But this is the SEC. It's not a nice guy league. The feel good story of the an assistant coming home and getting his dream job is over.

Need a guy that has a killer instinct like so many of our rivals and competitors. That wants to make the other team regret for ever stepping on the field. It's what it takes to survive

This is 100% my mindset.

I don't harbor the bitterness for Pittman that I do/did for Nutt, Bert, and Chad.

I think of him as a more likable Danny Ford. He pulled us from our deathbed and got us to respectability and didn't act like a shithead doing it.

Hopefully Yurachek is figuring out how to negotiate Pittman into a graceful exit into retirement. Instead of an ugly breakup, for once it'd be nice to have the former coach actually help recruit the new coach.

[buff2.0]

The revisionist copium about Petrino has always been cute, as if there's any other explanation besides us just not being a serious football program anymore.  Saying he was going to drop off as if the league hadn't been rigging entire games starting in 2009 to keep his teams from winning even more.  I was curious, so here's how many times since he was fired that we've beaten his 5-7 (4-4) 2008 record.

2015, Bielema's 3rd year out of 5.  We finished 8-5 (5-3), won a Liberty Bowl, and then fell apart over the next two seasons.

2021, Sam's 2nd year.  Went 9-4 (4-4) and won an Outback Bowl.  Didn't do as well the next season and it's safe to say we're not hitting that mark this year either.

Funny, in 2008 we finished 5th in the SECW.  In 2009 we only went 3-5 in the SEC and finished 4th in the West.  And fuck the SEC for straight up rigging two games against us that season.  Anyway, he ain't coming back, but the next coach needs to understand that he is the standard. 

[Feral]

Oddly enough, it was Jack Crowe who perfectly assessed Arkansas football in the summer of 1993.

Orville has a snippet about it in his book, but basically a writer for the Dem-Gazette ran into Crowe as both were picking their sons up from summer camp somewhere in Arkansas before Danny Ford's first season, and the writer asked Crowe what he thought about how Ford would do. Crowe's response was essentially that Ford would have his work cut out for him, and that Arkansas is never going to out-talent anyone and has always excelled by way of great coaching, scheming, and overachieving players. 

He basically described the Petrino era 15 years before it happened, as well as the blueprint for finding a head coach.

[Hizog]

I think this is a unique situation. Pittman was preparing for retirement when we hired him. He wants to retire in Arkansas and he obviously cares what people think about him. I don't think he's gonna string this along. He wants to go out on the lake and be the popular man everywhere he goes more than he wants to milk every last penny he can from the university. I think he exits gracefully after this season.

[Trigger7672]

Petrino did walk in to the best in state recruiting class in program history the season he got here. The guy can coach his ass off but he couldn't recruit for shit. He did fine with Strong's players when he went back to Louisville but he had a Chad Morris level season his final year there.

[The Whyte Boar]

I hope Sam rides off with his money.  I don't want to hate him.  But if he tries to stick around another year, I will and I won't be the only one.  He has plenty of money for him and his wife.  He has no kids or grandkids.  If I were his age and in his position financially, I might not even show up tomorrow.  It can't be fun.  There is no shame in stepping out of the rat race when by all objective financial measures, you've already won it.