Pittman introduces newly hired Hog coaches
FAYETTEVILLE - If you don’t recruit to Sam Pittman’s liking, you don’t last on his Arkansas football staff.
That seems the criteria for three of the four staff changes that Pittman made to his 10-man full-time assistant coaching staff after one year coaching the Razorbacks.
Receivers coach Justin Stepp, a Columbia, South Carolina, native, went home on his own accord to coach the receivers for new South Carolina Gamecocks Coach Shane Beamer.
Pittman replaced Stepp, the lone assistant Pittman retained in 2020 from the 2019 staff of fired former Arkansas Coach Chad Morris, with Kenny Guiton, the receivers coach in 2020 at Colorado State now at Arkansas on the strong recommendation of play-calling Arkansas offensive coordinator Kendal Briles. Briles was the 2018 play-calling offensive coordinator at the University of Houston while Guiton coached Houston’s receivers.
Pittman’s next three hires: Tight ends coach Cody Kennedy, defensive line coach Jermial Ashley and promoted from defensive quality control assistant to linebackers coach Michael Scherer, all stemmed in large part because Pittman professes believing them better recruiters than those coaching those Arkansas positions in 2020.
Though all have been toiling for Arkansas since last week or longer,
Pittman on Thursday for the first time publicly discussed all four new staffers and made them first-time available to media.
With an aggregate average age of 31, all are younger than the assistants they replace. Was that by design or just how it played out?
“That’s really how it played out,” Pittman said. “I was trying to bring in recruiters. Most of the time if you’re a good recruiter, you’re a good coach. To get Arkansas where we all believe that it should be and where it’s going to be, we have to continue to improve our recruiting. So that was a big part of all these hires, along with their coaching ability.”
Against an extremely tough entirely SEC schedule that because of the COVID-19 pandemic subtracted Arkansas’ four nonconference games and added two SEC games to the standard eight, the Razorbacks went 3-7.
It marked significant improvement from the successive 2-10 overall/ 0-8 in the SEC seasons under Morris, but not where Pittman wants the Hogs to be.
ESPN ranked Pittman’s second recruiting class a solid 21st nationally but only eighth in the ultra competitive 12-team SEC.
“You want to change your room, you’ve got to go get the players to do that,” Pittman said of upgrading recruiting. “We can’t just go, ‘Jamil Walker (the strength coach), you get these guys bigger and nastier and stronger and all those things.’ We’ve got to help him, as well, and I
think these guys will.”
What does Pittman, with Barry Odom second in command as the veteran defensive coordinator/ associate head coach and former Missouri head coach, seek from young assistants?
“He probably has to have maturity above his age,” Pittman said. “He’s got to be an old whatever his age is. Certainly a guy that has a work ethic to him. A hungry person to learn. But I’m not sure if age was a dictator of being a good coach, or hell, everybody would be my age. We’d have a whole staff of 60-year-olds. Well, I’m
59, but I want a guy that can coach, a guy that can recruit, and I don’t really care how old he is.”
The young newcomers do see an age advantage related to recruiting young men out of high school, junior college or the transfer portal.
“You know I think it helps to be able to relate to the kids,” Scherer said with the others saying much the same. “It wasn’t too long ago that I went through that process of having to go to school, do football and everything else that comes along with it and did it at a high level and successfully. So I think that is a big part of it. I’ve been in these kids shoes even from a recruiting standpoint not that long ago.”
Guiton from his two years at Houston joins Pittman’s staff with extensive recruiting throughout out Texas, a key Arkansas recruiting territory, and also Louisiana having assisted at Louisiana Tech. His ties to Briles obviously bind him to Arkansas.
“My relationship with Coach Briles is what got me in the door,” Guiton said. “We had an awesome year and we just clicked. And I think it’s gotten me where I am today.”
From watching Arkansas film, Guiton said Briles’ offense continues evolving.
“I think it’s cleaner,” Guiton said. “It’s easier verbiage. Back when we were at Houston, it was a lot of memorization and guys just literally had to remember a certain signal, see it and go. Now it’s cleaner. I think it’s easier on the guys to play even faster.”
Especially when Treylon