Arkansas opens a make-or-break season with a glorified scrimmage against Alabama A&M on Saturday. With a roster full of new faces, here’s what I’m watching for.
I’ll be blunt: I’m actually pretty optimistic about this year’s football team. Not playoff optimistic (although Kelley Ford claims that the Hogs are one of four teams that could make the playoff with as few as eight regular-season wins), but certainly much more optimistic than most of Razorback nation.
Some of the apathy is understandable: Arkansas has gone 7-6, 4-8, and 7-6 over the past three seasons. The head coach is entering his sixth season with a 30-31 record. The roster is mostly made up of out-of-state players who chose Arkansas due to NIL offers, not due to the love of the Hogs. It’s expensive to attend games and only getting more expensive as the university desperately needs to milk as much cash out of fans as possible to pay for the roster. That dynamic fosters an unhealthy relationship between fans and the program. I have thoughts about what should be done about that, but they probably won’t be popular here so I’ll refrain from discussing them.
So yes, there are long-term concerns about college football. But for the 2025 Razorback football team, I’m fairly optimistic about the product on the field. The schedule sort of limits the upside: Kelley Ford claims that the 12th-best team (that is, the last playoff team) would win about 7.1 games against Arkansas’ 2025 schedule. So the Hogs could 7-5 and actually be good enough for playoff consideration. That aligns with the view about that 8-4 might be good enough to get in.
The optimistic case
Here’s the optimist’s case for the entire Sam Pittman era heading into this year.
The 2021 season was the breakout. It was the Hogs’ best record since 2011 and probably their best overall team since then (the 2014 team and probably also 2015 may have been better by some advanced stats, but they won fewer games).
In 2022, major injury issues tanked what would have been a promising season. All but one member of the secondary two-deep missed at least one game with an injury, and quarterback KJ Jefferson missed two games (losses to Mississippi State and LSU, the latter very close) and was clearly hobbled in another (close loss to Liberty). In addition to the injury-plagued losses to LSU and Liberty, the Hogs also lost total toss-up games against Mizzou and Texas A&M (the latter featuring bizarre plays that included a 100-yard fumble return and an elite kicker missing a go-ahead field goal at the very end). A 6-6 team could have gone 8-4 with very little additional luck.
After the 2022 season, some kind of contract feud with offensive coordinator Kendal Briles led to Briles leaving and Pittman making the first real error of his tenure: the hiring of Dan Enos. That bad hire solely tanked the 2023 season as Arkansas fell to 108th nationally in total offense, leading to Enos’s midseason dismissal. As I wrote before the 2023 season, I was pretty skeptical of the Enos hire, as I did not think that was the direction Pittman needed to go. Obviously, I didn’t see it failing that badly.
Given another chance to make the right hire, Pittman hired Bobby Petrino in a Hail Mary attempt to save his job. Arkansas’ 2024 offense was massively improved, ranking in the top-10 in total offense. But yards aren’t points, and the Hogs regularly struggled to turn good drives into points. Missed field goals, turnovers, and negative plays were the big culprits. The latter two are on the offense, and those are pretty normal ways for a first-year offensive coordinator and first-year quarterback to struggle.
If Arkansas can limit turnovers and negative plays, the Hogs will have one of the best offenses in the nation. That’s really the optimistic case right there.
The biggest driver of negative plays was pass protection, especially from the right side of the line. Last year’s main starter at right tackle, Keyshawn Blackstock, was moved to defensive line in fall camp. That may be concerning for the defensive line that they needed him (and he immediately cracked the two-deep), but it can only be good news for an offensive line that desperately needed to upgrade from him at the position. And over at left tackle, Fernando Carmona was perfectly decent last year, but transfer Corey Robinson II is apparently so good that Carmona slid inside to left guard.
At running back, I’m a big fan of Mike Washington, whose running style reminds me of younger Rocket Sanders. He’s a good slashing zone back that will be a nice complement to Braylen Russell’s gap-scheme power running. At receiver, I don’t think there’s a new Andrew Armstrong on the roster, but that might be a good thing for Taylen Green, who needs to go through his progressions more instead of focusing on his top guy. O’Mega Blake is a certified home run threat, while Raylen Sharpe is an efficient, high-volume target ideal for shorter routes. Both are very sure-handed with very few career drops between them. And Jalen Brown and Courtney Crutchfield are former 4-star recruits with excellent upside who come to Fayetteville after freshman seasons in bad situations (Brown at 2-10 Florida State, Crutchfield playing for Eli Drinkwitz).
Defensively? I’m not sure. I like Cam Ball and Xavian Sorey a lot. I think Stephen Dix, Larry Worth III, and Quincey Rhodes are SEC-caliber players. I’m not sure about the rest of the roster. The Hogs seemed to do well in the portal for the secondary, as transfers have managed to push struggling returners Jaheim Singletary and Selman Bridges into backup roles, at least for week one. But I’m not sure about the defensive line. Anticipated transfer David Oke is injured, which certainly doesn’t help, but I’m not sure there’s enough depth to survive a slate of SEC slugfests plus Notre Dame.
So the optimistic case is that Arkansas wins a few shootouts. The offense is awesome, and the defense is good enough at times. A 7-5 season seems pretty attainable when you consider that Auburn, Mississippi State, and Mizzou all have to come to Fayetteville. The first two SEC games are against teams breaking in new quarterbacks (Ole Miss and Tennessee). Notre Dame also has a new quarterback. That two-game road stretch of Texas and LSU in November is the only part that looks really awful.
What to watch for
Alabama A&M will present a roster capable of a glorified scrimmage. The Bulldogs are about as weak as UAPB last year. They lost to Auburn 73-3 in their only game against an FBS team. This one will be over by halftime and the backups will play most of the second half.
So we won’t learn much about how good this team is, but we will learn about how they plan to use certain guys. Here’s what I’m watching for.
Running back reps. As mentioned, I’m high on Washington as lead back. He’s a very good receiver out of the backfield and his bread-and-butter run is the outside zone that is a staple of the Petrino offense (and many other schemes as well, including Briles’s). New Mexico State struggled to block for him, but he’s now stepping into a better scheme and with better players around him. I’d like to see how he’s used.
How Green spreads it around. His safety blanket is gone, but he spread the ball around nicely in the Liberty Bowl, earning Dazmin James a nice NIL check (…from Cal. Ok.). He’s got Blake and Brown for his deep balls, new tight end Rohan Jones for throwbacks and catch-and-runs, Sharpe and Kam Shanks for underneath routes, and CJ Brown for comebacks and mid-level routes. Plus Washington out of the backfield. If he tries to force-feed anyone against Alabama A&M, maybe you can be nervous. But my guess is that Petrino will try to involve a bunch of the new guys.
Who starts at right tackle. Transfer Shaq McRoy is still battling with veteran E’Marion Harris for the right tackle position that caused so much trouble last year. Harris struggled quite a bit, allowing 23 pressures last year, but McRoy, while a former 4-star recruit, is just a redshirt freshman. McRoy definitely has more upside, but Harris might be better right now.
Where the pass rush comes from. Rhodes seems like he’ll be the leading rusher as the weak-side end, but I’m a bit nervous about the other side, as Arkansas’ Over front needs both ends to be involved as pass rushers so DC Travis Williams doesn’t have to bring too many blitzes. Florida transfer Justus Boone, a former 4-star recruit, did not record much pressure during his time in Gainesville, but Troy transfer Phillip Lee did have five sacks last year. Arkansas probably won’t blitz much, so keep an eye on how much time the AAMU quarterback has against a four-man rush.
Punt return fireworks. The signing of Kam Shanks, arguably the best punt returner in the nation last year, seemingly signals that Pittman and special teams coordinator Scott Fountain are finally trying to create some return-game fireworks. It’s about time. Fountain has been excellent at recruiting and developing specialists for the kicking and punting game. The Hogs get touchbacks on almost every kickoff, have had excellent punting, had Cam Little as placekicker, and have had solid long-snapping and holding. They’ve even pulled off some nice fakes. But they’ve been very conservative in terms of returns, mostly not trying them at all. Some of that is a result of changes in the way punting is coached and kickoffs are handled (it’s much harder to return both punts and kickoffs than it was 15 years ago, for different reasons). However, if you have less talent, special teams are a great way to even the playing field. Petrino’s teams had excellent return games with Joe Adams on punts and Dennis Johnson on kickoffs. Shanks could legitimately win a game for you if he can create a big return in the right moment. He’ll get plenty of chances to show off his return prowess on Saturday.
Arkansas kicks off the 2025 season on Saturday against Alabama A&M in Fayetteville. Kickoff is at 3:15 and the game will be televised on the SEC Network.