Transparency at UA crucial in down times

If there ever has been a time for the University of Arkansas football and basketball programs to be completely transparent, it is now.

Those are the revenue sports, and ticket sales continue to slip. It is a national trend. Maybe not for teams who play for championships, but definitely for those who are not competing on the highest level.

The football program is coming off a 2-10 season, the worst in school history. The basketball team is struggling, and in Mike Anderson’s eighth season no one expected that.

Transparent does not mean putting things on the UA’s website. Jeff Long is gone.

It means meeting with all the media — newspapers, television, radio and websites — that aren’t under the UA umbrella, and peeling the onion down to the hard facts.

It means finding time to allow the media to interview the players one-on-one so the fans can read and hear about the young men’s lives, and get to know them better than they have in the past six years.

Nolan Richardson, Eddie Sutton, Ken Hatfied, Houston Nutt and many other former Razorback head coaches did everything they could to make the players the face of the program.

That’s what the UA needs now.

Transparency and accountability start at the very top. Fans have a need and a desire to know, and right now they need to know all there is to know before they give up.

Forget crazy rumors for a while about players transferring from both programs, and don’t expect Chad Morris to name a starting quarterback coming out of spring practice because there is absolutely no way he knows.

That’s why in his news conference Monday, he mentioned all four quarterbacks every time the subject of quarterbacks was discussed.

No one is asking Morris to break any rules or laws. If a young man is having to make up some academic work to get in good standing or if he has left school and didn’t tell the coaches, no one expects Morris to say that.

In fact, it would behoove the football program to release a complete spring roster so the fans — and the media — will know who is a Hog and who isn’t.

No doubt, some of the glare of being a head football coach in the SEC is still new and maybe a little blinding for Morris.

In his three years at SMU, he probably dealt with one guy from the Dallas Morning News and one from the student newspaper, and they probably asked him for one interview during game week and some time after a game. In Dallas, the Cowboys are king and always page one, while the Mustangs are usually page six or seven.

At Arkansas, there are at least a couple of dozen reporters every day. All of them just want to do their job.

Telling them Justice Hill might be a running back, wide receiver, cornerback or quarterback was not an elusive play, but the truth is while Hill is a talented athlete who can help the Hogs somewhere, his passion is quarterback and he is a prototype of today’s successful quarterbacks. He can beat you with his arm or his legs.

He is on basketball scholarship, but it seems obvious he was always serious about trying football because high school basketball players don’t usually enroll for the spring semester of college. That’s typically what football players who want to get a jump start by going through spring drills do.

Hill and all of his teammates, whoever they are, will create interest in the program. After going 2-10 and not winning a single SEC game, the program needs to be transparent and create interest.