Spent Money…Change In Process
September 30, 2008 by HogBlogger
While we really shouldn’t have expected to beat either Alabama or Texas…should we have expected to be annihilated?
It’s obvious that the poor recruiting of defensive players during the Reggie Herring regime was even worse than we thought at the time. It just appears that there is no one who can play.
But that can’t be the whole story. Wasn’t the defensive line supposed to be a strength?
So was the offensive line, but I’m just not seeing it. Being an optimist, I do think the situation would be quite a bit different if Mitch Petrus were playing. Petrus sitting out the year has left a huge gap in the line.
(Note to Jeff Long: please continue stressing to the academic advisors for both football and basketball that their efforts can make a huge difference in a team’s performance on the field.)
So what’s really going on with this football team?
I’ve gotten just a little ‘word’ that perhaps some of the upperclassmen have not quite bought into Coach Petrino. Not much ‘word,’ but just a little. Those things happen when you make a coaching change.
Players tend to play much better for the people that recruit them. They are recruited to a school to play in a specific system. They are attracted and react positively to a specific style of coaching.
The system and style of coaching at Arkansas have totally changed from previous years. The old notion of smash mouth football and a ‘love ya, rah rah, let’s play a game of three on three to 21′ coaching style is gone.
Bobby Petrino is the brainiac offensive genius CEO coach who treats both the game and the players as ‘just business, we are not friends, I’ve loved many helmets in my time.’
Coaches must have their type of players to be successful. Sometimes it can happen quickly, such as the way Nick Saban has transformed Alabama in just his second season. But usually, as we saw with Nolan, it tends to take at least a couple of years to get the ship pointed in the direction you want to go.
So how has Houston Dale already had pretty good success at Mississippi? How did he have such good success in his first year at Arkansas? It’s pretty easy to explain. In both cases, not only did he inherit some good talent, it was talent primarily recruited to play smash mouth football. The change in offensive system wasn’t much of a change.
As well, teams that have struggled to find the love react well to the ‘love ya, rah rah’ coaching style. In that type of situation, Houston Dale is a perfect fit.
It’s much harder to transition a team to the ‘brainac, just business’ approach. Petrino and his coaches are coaching their way, with their system and their approach. They are not really retrofitting their system to any great degree to the existing players. No more than Nolan did in his first couple of years.
The Razorbacks are playing in a system that they expect to recruit to (and be successful with) 3-5 years down the road. Unfortunately, going about it this way may result in a few more annihilation experiences before this season is over.
Change isn’t pretty. The end result — short term and sometimes long term — is not always what is expected or wanted. Sometimes the path requires a journey through the valley of death.
Hang tough. This may take a while.
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9 Responses to “Spent Money…Change In Process”
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We are playing freshman at reciever, linebacker, safety, and running back. We have seven returning starters. We have zero impact players on either side of the ball. We are playing a four game stretch against Top 10 programs. Whoopin’s are Us.
Maybe we will at least see a little football at Kentucky, Tulsa, and Miss St.
It’s hard to play SEC football without a defense and a running game no matter what else you do. Did you see Snead’s stats against Florida? 9 of 20 for 139 yards, sound familiar?
What do the seniors have to play for? A bowl game? Pride? Fun? Easier said than done. The sooner the fans get on board for the bad times the sooner the coaches can move on to rebuilding. We’ve been here before.
And, the new coaches don’t really know the players. It’s not necessarily that they are doing a bad job, it may be no one’s fault that the chemistry is very different. By the end of the season, after they get to know each other better you might be surprised or just more disappointed.
Nobody likes to get beat as bad as we did the last 2 weeks and possibly this coming week… and Auburn will probably score way more points than they need to beat us, but not as many as Tex & Fla. A realist would also have expected us to lose these 4 games in a row with the complete overhaul underway currently. We Hog fans tend to be optimists in our outlook and that’s not really a bad thing. We may or may not win another game this year but does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Most of us expect great things to happen in the next 2 of 3 years that’ll make this short-term pain tolerable. Are the Sooner fans still moping around because they were pathetic for a couple of years before Stoops took over? I don’t think so. Maybe this team will have a few surprises for us this year, but even if they don’t, I’ll still believe better times are coming. GO HOGS!
This my friends is a work in process and only hope the finished product will come in a couple of years. I am little disappointed defensively there has been such a decline, but no doubt Petrino will get the ship corrected. There maybe some surprises this year, I hope we can be competitve and have a chance to win atleast a couple of more games this year.
Upperclassmen better buy into Bobby or they will find themselves on the bench. I don’t believe that Bobby will continue to invest in players that are working for him. Especially, in a few down years… let’s see… lose 8-9 games with bad attitude upperclassmen or win 2-3 games with inexperience…. hmmmm. My guess is that Bobby will give them a chance but if push comes to shove… it’s playin’ time for those younger players! Yeah, baby!
With deer season approaching, attendance will slack. I just wish our basketball team wasn’t still in rebuild mode. I watched the Texas debacle in its entirety, and it was obvious that these players have relied on a coach to emotionaly charge them to make up for talent gaps. BP is not that coach, and the team played with zero emotion.
HDN was true to form. He gets his team up for 1 big game a year. We should remember that and thank him for it (and thank him for pissing off Florida)
2008 Florida #4
2007 LSU #1
2006 Auburn #2
2005 Almost Georgia #4 (recruiting limited)
2004 Almost Texas #7 (recruiting limited)
2003 Texas #5
2002 Almost Tennessee #10
2001 SC #9
2000 No big games unless you count Miss St #13
1999 Tennessee #3
1998 Almost Tennessee #1
Guinness, Houston also did something he couldn’t do at Arkansas. Winning an SEC game after his first SEC loss!
Good times are ahead, but just not as fast as a lot of people would like. Everyone like’s to win, but not everyone has the patients to wait. We’ve been waiting since 1989 to have a championship caliber team, but haven’t been blessed enough to achieve a coach to put it all into place, until now. These coaches are completely scrapping the old system. If every position on this team had exsperience, it would still be tough for a little while. You simply can’t be coached one way for 2 or 3 years, then completely scrap what you were used to over those years, pick up something new, and then put all the pieces together like you’ve done it your whole life, in a matter of a few short months. Not to mention, you have a very small percentage of SR. leadership on this team to begin with, all the while trying to create some cemistry with 16 new-comers, on a regular basis. It just doesn’t work like that. Like I’ve said before, there are a lot of R.S. Fresh, and sophmores on this team, that didn’t play, or played very little last year, because of the exsperience and talent ahead of them, or simply because they were injured. This only make’s the adjustment more difficult. You might as well be playing a whole team full of rookies, because basically, that what we are.
[...] is much worse than we expected. Our friends over at RazorBloggers.net have a good column about new systems and players buying into said systems. They summize that this rebuilding is probably going to take longer than expected and that we [...]