Now the coaching search can start in earnest.

That’s the most immediate thought after Arkansas embarrassed itself in a 33-24 loss to Auburn. Leading 21-10 at halftime, the Arkansas offense completely collapsed in the second half, their six possessions ending with punt, field goal, turnover, turnover, turnover, and turnover.

Everything associated with this program as it currently exists has to go. I mean everything. That includes Bobby Petrino. Look, I admit that I got suckered in by the nostalgia. I was a freshman at the U of A in 2010, spending the night in a tent to get into the game against top-ranked Alabama. Petrino remains a very good offensive coordinator, so like many Razorback fans, I thought it would be cool if he could turn this season around, earn the job, get a good defensive coordinator and large NIL budget, and return this program to winning. But that’s not going to happen. Petrino has been a productive offensive coordinator, but Arkansas does not have a single win during the Petrino 2.0 era that happened primarily because of an elite offense. The three SEC wins were against Tennessee (14 points allowed by the defense), Auburn (14 points), and Mississippi State (25 points allowed against a 2-10 team). Every game that became a shootout ended in defeat. It was easy to blame Pittman, but Petrino is 0-3 with the same results: offense piles up stats in shootout losses, and then when the defense plays well, the offense falls apart.

And Petrino just hasn’t been that good of a head coach since that fateful motorcycle ride in April 2012. It’s time to move on, because everything associated with what we saw on Saturday needs to go.

That sort of flies in the face of what I wrote last Sunday, that Arkansas might not have a choice but to keep Petrino due to the number of competing job openings. But what happened against Auburn was an absolute worst-case scenario. It confirmed that continuing to back to the same well over and over and over again is not going to get this football program out of a 15-year rut. Nostalgia sells tickets, it doesn’t win games.

Petrino’s not the only thing that needs to be cleaned out. As Trey Biddy noted in his always-excellent Walk & Talk after the game, the stadium song choices were inappropriate for the game situation in the fourth quarter. When announcing the starting lineups during the pregame of the Notre Dame game, the PA announcer was clearly given the hometowns of last year’s starters, so basically every single player had their hometown named wrong. The stadium hype duo of Jon Williams and Taliyah Brooks is corny. I could go on, but everything just stinks with this football program right now. It needs to be completely burned down and rebuilt.

Something else that may need to be cleaned out is Hunter Yurachek. He’s ultimately in charge of everything, from the bad contract for Sam Pittman to the gameday atmosphere. Does anyone have confidence that he’s capable of making the right hire here? It seems that he has a good eye for coaching talent but is a brute-force (and therefore poor) negotiator, as he always seems to get played by agents for raises or lose deals once the price tag moves out of his budget. His best hire was largely initiated and negotiated by megadonor John Tyson.

Getting on the same page

I had an entire section here about Arkansas’ identity, or lack thereof, as a football program. But identities change, and Arkansas’ move to the SEC in 1992 probably hurt its ability to cultivate a clear identity as a program. Arkansas needs a coach who can win in the modern SEC.

This isn’t the same job it was in 1992 or in December 2007. Arguably, it’s not even a good job anymore. Arkansas once recruited the Dallas-Fort Worth area heavily because there were no SEC programs there; the addition of Texas A&M in 2012 severed that pipeline hard. The Hogs could push into Tulsa… but now Oklahoma is in the SEC. They could push north into St. Louis or Kansas City… but not with much success given that Missouri is there. Arkansas is surrounded and trapped in a state that doesn’t produce nearly enough in-state players to compete.

The only hope is to hire a really, really good coach. There are names being thrown around, but I’m not very confident in most of them. Here are a few things worth looking for.

Doesn’t call their own plays. This was unheard of just a couple decades ago, but the NFL-ification of college football in evident in the fact that coaches who don’t call their own plays tend to do better in power conferences, a trend that has risen in the last five years or so. The modern job demands so much of the head coach that adding play calling duties generally leaves them struggling to perform in other parts of the job. Coaches who do call their own plays are having issues this year: think Steve Sarkisian and Billy Napier. Coaches like Lane Kiffin and Ryan Day, who were thought of as offensive gurus, gave up play calling and are thriving. Other coaches who tried, like Gus Malzahn, quickly found that play calling was really all they were good at, hence their return to a coordinator role. No teams in the AP top 10 as of this week have a coach who calls his own plays. This is why I’m a little skeptical of Rhett Lashlee, who calls plays at SMU.

Not a headline-grabber. I’m far from a perfect coaching evaluator, but I’m proud of myself for nailing Mike Elko as an awesome hire for Texas A&M. It is with sadness I report that Elko is exactly what the Aggies needed as a head coach. He’s ambitious enough to maintain a high standard, yet humble enough to recognize his need for quality assistants, and he preaches hard work and discipline rather than flashy showmanship. After more than a decade of flamboyant and arrogant coaches like Kevin Sumlin and Jimbo Fisher, Texas A&M made an excellent, course-correcting hire in Elko.

After years of arrogant coaches who were either prestigious names (Petrino, Bret Bielema) or sloganeering self-promotors (Chad Morris), the Hogs swung too far in the other direction with Sam Pittman, ending up with a visionless coach who, at least initially, had the humility and delegation skills to succeed, but lacked the vision to sustain. The next hire must find that happy medium: ambitious and visionary, but willing to delegate and not overly arrogant. Smart, but more focused on hard work and discipline than strategic brilliance.

Someone like… well, Houston Nutt had a lot of these qualities when Arkansas hired him. Nutt’s arrogance eventually overwhelmed the program, but not before his Arkansas-first energy and emphasis on fundamental football breathed new life into a program that had fallen behind in the 1990s. A carbon copy of Nutt would not work in 2025, but those qualities exist in candidates that would work. They’re not big names right now. The best possible hire might be a coordinator at this moment.

I think there’s a good chance that Arkansas beats Mississippi State next week. The Bulldogs are still searching for Jeff Lebby’s first SEC win, and their heartbreak against Texas was even more severe than what we saw in Fayetteville. But 3-9 feels like a best-case scenario.

At least it’s basketball season.