More Arkansas, not less needed for Razorbacks

FAYETTEVILLE — One of the best things Barry Lunney Jr. has done upon becoming the Arkansas Razorbacks interim coach is not whole Hog auditioning for the job permanently.

Obviously if Lunney masterminded tonight the hapless Hogs victorious over the nationally No. 1 LSU Tigers in Baton Rouge, La., Lunney wouldn’t just audition for Arkansas. He’d be auditioning for induction into the College Football Hall of Fame. Taking down the 10-0, 6-0 in the SEC Tigers, at their Death Valley, with an Arkansas outfit, 2-8, 0-6 under Nov. 10-fired coach Chad Morris after a 2-10, 0-8 2018 would make Lunney football’s miracle worker facsimile to Annie Sullivan with Helen Keller.

Tooting his own horn promising said miracle would be fantasy folly.

“It’s about the players,” Lunney said and has lived up to since bestowed the interim job by athletic director Hunter Yurachek the Nov. 10 day after Western Kentucky embarrassed Arkansas, 45-19 in Fayetteville.

It’s about, win or lose, these games tonight and next Friday’s finale against Missouri in Little Rock restoring the Razorbacks to fight like Razorbacks again.

On this current staff only Lunney firsthand experienced that definition. He lived it from 1992-1995 quarterbacking Arkansas through up and downs of 3-7-1, 5-5-1, and 4-7 seasons then peaking with Danny Ford’s 8-5 Razorbacks winning the 1995 SEC West.

Lunney knows when those teams fought to the max and when they lapsed. He knows these discouraged Hogs lapsed since losing 24-20 the Kentucky game they could have won. It triggered losing 51-10 and 48-7 to national SEC powers Auburn and Alabama then drubbed about as badly by the ordinary, 54-24 and 45-19 vs. Mississippi State and Western Kentucky.

Though Arkansas hired just in December 2017, Yurachek already understands what his imported from the north predecessor athletic director Jeff Long never did in his 10 Arkansas years before finally fired.

A “Razorback through and through” Yurachek described a prime Lunney attribute as the staff’s only Arkansan, UA grad and former Razorbacks player.

Long could have elevated Tim Horton, the lone UA grad and Razorbacks letterman on the Bobby Petrino’s staff when Petrino had to be fired for putting his mistress on the support staff payroll. Long instead hired the bumbling, bankrupt John L. Smith as the interim 2012 coach. Left in limbo upon the head coaching hire of Bret Bielema, Horton committed moving on to Auburn before Bielema could belatedly offered him to stay.

Another Arkansas pillar lost for a program desperately needing to recapture its Arkansas identity.

It’s periodically conjectured that Lunney might forfeit remaining on Arkansas’ 2020 staff because a new head coach would feel threatened that Lunney had been head coach.

Should that prove true, Yurachek will have hired the wrong man.

The post Frank Broyles era’s 10 years disdain for the Arkansas in the Arkansas Razorbacks greased the slide into this current football oblivion.

It behooves Arkansas’ next coach adding to not subtracting Arkansas from the Razorbacks.