COLUMN: Call Hogs’ shaky start team effort
Watching Razorback football lately ranks somewhere between taking castor oil and filling out a tax return. Doctors prescribe the former, and the government demands the latter. Draw your own conclusions why one keeps calling the Hogs.
If the games aren’t bad enough, the mornings after are becoming unbearable. Some of the comments on Facebook and Twitter have become antisocial with discourse as pointed as that in Washington between Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell. Everyone is to blame, it seems, even people no longer affiliated with the program and some being paid not to coach or administrate on the Fayetteville campus.
A most ignoble Razorback defeat, 31-24 to San Jose State last week, brought many to a feeling of high dudgeon. It was unexpected, with Arkansas a
20-point favorite at kickoff, but hardly, to use the word of an ex-Razorback coach, uncommon.
In practical terms, Arkansas’
12th defeat in 16 games under its present coach strengthened the position of those who think Chad Morris over his head. Online critics were talking of firing Morris and/or defensive coordinator John Chavis before halftime Saturday night, when Arkansas, on its home field, trailed 24-7 to a team thumped by Tulsa two weeks before (Tulsa, remember, is one of two games that the Razorbacks won last year in the program’s first
10-loss season).
The kindest thing some say about Morris is that he recruits well. His game-day performance is another matter. Pat Forde, writing on Yahoo.com, gives Morris an F grade after “a blazing 4-12 start, made worse by the fact that’s he’s played a feather-bed nonconference schedule and still taken bad losses to Colorado State, North Texas and San Jose. He’s 0-9 in SEC games, and the Razorback figure to be prohibitive underdogs in [their] seven remaining conference matchups this year.”
With Texas A&M favored over Arkansas by more than 20 points on Saturday at a neutral site, it can be argued that Morris, paraphrasing a line from the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” took a sad song and has not made it better.
Some coaches, it seems, are star-kissed when it comes to quarterbacks. Does anyone remember the last time Nick Saban did not have a good one at Alabama? Increasingly, Morris comes across as a coach who can’t make up his mind, like Hamlet, about a football team’s most important offensive position.
Cole Kelley and Ty Storey, two of the four Morris sifted through last year, are playing for other teams, and Connor Noland cast his lot with UA baseball, possibly his portal to the professional ranks. John Stephen Jones, meanwhile, recruited out of Dallas’ tradition-rich Highland Park High, languishes on the bench, which cannot be pleasing to his grandfather, Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys and a major Razorback booster.
Now, the quarterback debate is between two who transferred from old Arkansas rivals in the old Southwest Conference. Ben Hicks, who played for Morris at SMU, started the season but was pulled at halftime of the Week Two Ole Miss game. Nick Starkel, late of Texas A&M, could not prevent a road loss to Ole Miss (the only SEC school second-year Rebel coach Matt Luke has beaten) but fired three touchdown passes a week later against Colorado State (to which Arkansas lost on the road last year).
That was followed by a cover-your-eyes, five-interception game against San Jose State. Starkel, frequently seen on Facebook, said the next day that he would no longer wear his T-shirt honoring singer Justin Bieber, as if that were the cure for overthrowing receivers or over the middle to opposing
defenders.
Based on early returns, Starkel does not come across as a thinking-man’s quarterback; instead he appears challenged by Morris’ offense, which asks the quarterback to read and react. (“They send in personnel and the blocking scheme only, not a called play,” says a northwest Arkansas writer and longtime Razorback observer. “Starkel has three options on every play. But sometimes, they have to tell him in practice to hand the ball off.”) Against a scatter-armed quarterback, like Starkel was against San Jose State, a defense need not have a strong pass rush; better to keep him — and his mistakes — in the game rather than knock him out.
The No. 2 quarterback on a team with difficulties is said to be the most popular guy in town. Not necessarily so in Fayetteville concerning Starkel or Hicks. Jones is basically unproven, and K.J. Pennington, a highly recruited freshman from Mississippi, is expected to redshirt.
Running back Rakeem Boyd, a Morris recruit starting for the second year in a row, pops one now and then but lacks the breakaway speed of ex-Hogs Darren McFadden and Felix Jones. Arkansas has some explosive young receivers, the best seen on campus since the Bobby Petrino era, and a potential game-breaking tight end in senior Cheyenne O’Grady; but how can they develop rapport with these quarterbacks — Hicks looking indecisive and Starkel wild.
Then again, we may be expecting too much of an offense that started a true freshman (Ricky Stromberg) at right guard and redshirt sophomore (Dalton Wagner) at right tackle against San Jose State. Unless such players are using college as a halfway house to a long pro career, only a desperate team plays kids on the offensive line.
As for John Chavis’ defense, says my northwest Arkansas source, “Do you think he teaches them in practice to back up and miss tackles?” Even with four senior starters sprinkled in, Chavis started a freshman (Greg Brooks Jr.), a redshirt freshman (LaDarrius Bishop), a true sophomore (Joe Foucha) and a redshirt sophomore (Jarques McClellion) in the secondary against San Jose State. One shudders to think what Kellen Mond (A&M), Tua Tagovailoa (Alabama), Bo Nix (Auburn) and Joe Burrow (LSU) might do against the Hogs.
“In effect,” says the Fayetteville man, “they’re starting a high-school defense in the SEC.”
Arkansas does not play another home game until Oct. 19, against Auburn, which may be good. Disgruntled fans always can turn off TVs (or not tune in) and need not fight postgame (halftime?) traffic.