The pick is in: Arkansas has hired Ryan Silverfield as its next head coach.
Oh boy. Silverfield was widely viewed as the worst of the four reported finalists. But Eric Morris ended up at North Texas, Alex Golesh at Auburn, and Kane Wommack remains Alabama’s defensive coordinator. He could be a candidate at Ole Miss.
It’s still not clear what happened over the last few days. Arkansas seemed to be targeting Golesh, but a leak to Trey Schaap seemed to enrage him enough to drive him to pick a different SEC school. Wommack was widely thought of as Plan B, and I argued he should be Plan A, and I certainly was not a fan of Silverfield.
Let’s be clear, though, before we overreact. First, it is hard to predict how coaches will do after making the jump. Plenty of can’t-miss hires have failed, and plenty of underwhelming hires have succeeded. And second, I don’t actually think Silverfield is a bad coach at all. This is just a very underwhelming hire for a fan base that wanted some juice.
The goal with Silverfield is to be a better version of Sam Pittman. If you thought that Pittman was close but lacked the game management and administrative skill to get the Hogs over the top, then you should be pretty happy with Silverfield. He’s a good recruiter, competent game manager, and he’s made the CEO-style head coaching approach work in a way Pittman never could. To succeed, he’ll minimally need good coordinators and other assistant coaches. Strong NIL funding would certainly help as well. If he gets that, this might work.
Even as Arkansas fans have melted down over the announcement, national media is not reacting the same way. As we’ll see below, his consistency at a non-power school is something that jumps out in the transfer portal era, as those schools tend to rise and fall quickly as their rosters are poached.
Of course, there are so many ways it could fail. He has zero SEC experience, and the angry and disappointed reactions of fans to his hiring is going to start him off on the wrong foot. He may struggle to raise funds until he gives fans something to hope in. If he can’t make good coordinator hires, he lacks the ability to overcome that since, like Pittman, he was never an offensive coordinator himself.
Ultimately, I think Arkansas could have done better here, but I also think it’s possible this works out just fine. Silverfield is a better coach than Arkansas’ last two coaches, and he’s more of a fit than the coach before that (Bret Bielema). I would still be curious to hear Hunter Yurachek’s logic behind this choice.
Let’s quickly look at his resume and what’s next.
Silverfield’s resume
Despite lacking SEC experience, Silverfield offers both NFL experience and regional experience at Memphis.
A native of Jacksonville, Florida, he coached high school and Division III football for a few years before landing a job in the Vikings organization, where he worked his way up from analyst to assistant offensive line coach between 2008 and 2013. He was then an assistant OL coach for the Lions in 2015 before Memphis hired him to coach their offensive line in 2016 under Justin Fuente. He proved to be an excellent offensive line coach and was retained by Fuente’s successor Mike Norvell, rising to run game coordinator from 2017 to 2019. After Norvell left, he became Memphis’s full-time head coach.
He got off to a very slow start: 8-3, 6-6, and 7-6 over his first three seasons. But the breakthrough came in 2023, when Memphis went 10-3, followed by an 11-2 season last year. This year was expected to be a rebuilding year and it was, as the Tigers slipped to 8-4. For his six seasons, he’s 50-25.
The record isn’t bad, but Memphis was sitting atop the American Conference when Silverfield was hired, and they have plenty of resources relative to their conference mates. But he took a long time to rebuild, then the peak was only two years, and through six seasons he’s never even reached an AAC title game.
On the flip side, he’s 3-0 against Alex Golesh and 2-0 against Eric Morris, other finalists for the Arkansas job. And although he’s failed to win a conference title, he’s provided stability in a non-power conference, which is very hard to do when rosters are raided every offseason.
How can Silverfield win the fans over?
Silverfield is a good recruiter, and his success will depend on hiring good coordinators and letting them work. Again, it’s the Pittman model, but Silverfield has demonstrated more competency at it. The quickest way to win fans over is to show both: we need to see two solid coordinator hires come together quickly. Bringing his Memphis coordinators with him would be unacceptable.
As I mentioned in my post backing Wommack, I would love to see Arkansas move towards a more pro-style offense. I used that to justify Wommack over Golesh, but you could apply it to Silverfield too, since has NFL experience. After years of a fun, pro-style passing attack under several different quarterbacks, the Tigers pivoted to a more spread-option sort of offense this season with Nevada transfer Brendon Lewis. They ran the ball really well, but the pass game was lacking. Silverfield will want to run the ball, which I’m fine with, but I’d prefer not to see any more one-dimensional offense.
Recruiting is the other way to win fans over. Silverfield already knows the Arkansas recruiting landscape well, and getting some in-state commits into the fold quickly would help. Arkansas’ failure to pursue Greenwood’s Kane Archer has been baffling, but Silverfield may could change that.
What of Yurachek?
Hunter Yurachek’s seat is now blazing hot. If this hire doesn’t immediately start to show promise, he’s going to be out of a job. You could probably argue that he already should be fired. He fired a coach in September (thereby admitting that he should have fired him last year), had 60-plus days to make a hire, didn’t seem to generate any interest from sitting power conference head coaches, whiffed on Golesh possibly due to bad operational security, and then chose a coach who finished 4-4 in his conference when other options were available.
And all of that is just in the last couple months. He also failed to make a competitive offer for Lane Kiffin in 2019 and then gave Pittman an unnecessary raise and extension after the 2021 season. The football program has gone 0-8 in SEC play in three of his nine seasons as athletic director and 1-7 in two others. Arkansas’ gameday atmosphere is horrible in both basketball and football, and early-season basketball attendance has been horrible for the last few seasons, with a major reseating not helping anything.
A lot is riding on the hire of Silverfield. A lot has to go right for him to succeed. If he’s up to the task, the Hogs could be fine. It’s going to be a very busy next few weeks as the Hogs try and put together a roster for 2026.