Arkansas Q & A
This has been a pretty crazy week with an unplanned trip to Mississippi for a family funeral. As such, I missed out on the SEC Power Poll for the second week in a row and most of the coverage for the upcoming game against the Razorbacks.
I received an email a few days ago from the Razorback Expats asking about doing a Q & A for the upcoming game. Here are my questions to them and their answers. They should have my responses to their questions posted soon.
1. How has Bobby Petrino been received since coming to Arkansas?
Because of his style of play and his record at Louisville, Hog fans were very excited about the Petrino hire and remain so. The fans were more or less prepared for a less-than-stellar season, so no one is holding this year’s sub-.500 record against him. Most of us realize it could take Bobby a while to get the program where we all want it to be.
And the fact that Petrino was bashed so severely by ESPN and other segments of the national sports media when he left Atlanta for Fayetteville made Arkansas fans cotton to him even more. Being that our state is the butt of so many jokes, Arkansans are hyper-sensitive to outside criticism and have something of an us-against-the-world mentality (surely Mississippians can relate). Seeing Petrino get raked over the coals really made the fans rally around him. He may be a rascal, but he’s our rascal.
2. The Hogs had a tough time against Alabama, Texas and Florida.. Since then, they have really stepped it up on offense, beating Auburn and Tulsa and barely losing to Ole Miss and Kentucky. Did anything change mid-season?
Yeah, the level of competition. We knew going into the season that the Hogs would be enduring a Murderer’s Row when they played Alabama, Texas and Florida back-to-back-to-back. But we didn’t know how much of a Murderer’s Row it would be. Those teams are even better than we feared they would be. We’re getting dizzy just thinking about those match-ups again.
Another factor in the Hogs’ improved performance would have to that the team is getting more comfortable with Petrino’s system, and the many young players are going more experience. And, oh, the emergence of junior running back Michael Smith hasn’t hurt either (more on that below).
3. You really can’t replace a tandem like McFadden and Jones, but who are the offensive weapons that Casey Dick is giving the ball to this year?
Without a doubt, our #1 offensive weapon this year has been junior RB Michael Smith. The past two seasons he had to live in the shadows of McFadden and Jones (understandably) and didn’t play much, but this year has been his coming out party. His pace has slowed down in the last few weeks (probably because he carried the ball 35 times in back-to-back games), but for much of the season he led the SEC in rushing. He’s a little guy, but is super quick and hard to tackle. Without Smith, we shudder to think what the Hogs’ offensive performance would have looked like this year.
Besides Smith, we have tight end D.J. Williams, who is our top receiving threat, and a couple of promising young freshman receivers in Joe Adams and Jarius Wright.
4. What about on Defense? What players should the Bulldogs be worried about?
Our defense has been pretty iffy this year. We went through that brutal early stretch when we couldn’t stop anybody, but in retrospect that was probably more due to the teams we were playing rather than our own D (nobody has had much luck stopping Alabama, Florida or Texas, for example). We don’t have any major stars on defense, but we’re personally fans of DT Malcolm Sheppard…he’s usually good for a big play or two.
5. Arkansas has pretty much owned Mississippi State with 9 consecutive wins and an over-all record of 12-5-1. Give me a prediction for this weekend’s game.
We’re not sure what the betting line for the game is, but this is probably the first game we’ve been given a decent shot to win since we played a couple of cupcakes to open the season, so it’s an unfamiliar position to be in. Being Razorback fans, we tend to expect the worst. The thing that worries us is that the Bulldogs are a tough, pound-it-out type of team and we struggled mightily against South Carolina when they put it on the ground against us.
But, the Hogs have apparently had a good week of practice and until the South Carolina game at least (which was a big setback in terms of progress), they’ve gotten better as the season has gone on. We’ll say they put together enough decent offensive moments and avoid too many major mistakes to pull out a 20-17 win.
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