Orlando Hogs are in love with coach Pittman
More college football coaches should be required to follow the career path of Arkansas Razorbacks head coach Sam Pittman.
It might make them more humble and less arrogant. More thankful and less greedy. It might even give them a sense of perspective instead of a sense of entitlement.
“I have to tell you, it was reaching a point where I was starting to come to terms with the fact that I was never going to get a chance to be a head coach,” Pittman told me Monday night after addressing the Orlando Touchdown Club and whipping Orlando-area Hogs into a Woo Pig Sooie frenzy. “I was getting older and starting to think, ‘Hey, maybe it’s not in the cards.’ Look at me, do I look like I should be an SEC head coach?”
Pittman, 60, pulls back the bottom of his sport coat to show his ample belly and, as he smiles, his weathered face shows every worry line from 36 years of toiling behind the scenes before he finally got a chance to live his dream.
This is why Pittman is my new favorite bigtime college head coach; because he doesn’t look or act like your typical bigtime college head coach. He’s not very polished or magnetic and doesn’t command the room when he walks through the door. He is a self-described “fat kid” who looks like the plumber who would show up to unclog your drain and utter a few curse words as he tried to squeeze his big body into the small area underneath the sink.
Another thing I love about Pittman is nobody ever gave him anything. He was never the hot, young offensive coordinator who was handed a head-coaching job based upon a couple of seasons of scoring a bunch of points while running a trendy no-huddle offense. He was never the up-and-coming, good-looking, charismatic candidate who
got a big-time job based upon one season of success as a head coach at a Group of 5 program (see Scott Frost). He was never the can’t-miss, slam-dunk, home-run hire who all college ADs desired and drooled over.
Pittman started out as an assistant high school coach, worked his way up to head high school coach, then he became a junior college assistant coach, then a junior college head coach. Then he spent the next quarter-century crisscrossing the country as mostly an offensive line coach at 10 different schools: Northern Illinois. Western Michigan. Kansas. Back to Northern Illinois. Arkansas. Oklahoma. And on and on.
“It was a journey,” Pittman says. “At one point, I was out of coaching for a year and didn’t know what my next move was.”
As fate would have it, he eventually landed at Arkansas as the offensive line coach under former head Hog head coach Bret Bielema. However, after three seasons, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart came hard after Pittman, and the Bulldogs bought out his contract even though the embattled Bielema fought hard to keep him.
Finally at an elite program with elite talent, Pittman became known as one of the best offensive line coaches and best recruiters in the country at Georgia. And when the Arkansas job opened up in 2019, he went after it relentlessly because he knew it would be his best and last chance to be a head coach. He grew up 25 miles across the Oklahoma border from the Arkansas state line, and he attended former Arkansas coach Lou Holtz’s football camps as a kid. Coaching the Hogs truly was his dream job.
When Arkansas made him an offer, he accepted it before he even knew what it paid and then went on SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt and said, “I’m not interested in any other program. Arkansas is truly the greatest program in America to me. … We’re home and this is where we want to be. And this will be my last job.”
When Arkansas drew up the papers, they held Pittman to his word and put a non-compete clause in his contract, stating that he could never leave Arkansas for another SEC coaching job.
“I ran my big mouth to Scott Van Pelt and that cost me some money,” Pittman told the Orlando Touchdown Club.
Of course, he laughed when he told the story, but not nearly as much as the nation laughed when Arkansas hired this 58-year-old career offensive line coach to lead their program.
Dan Wolken of USA Today called the Razorbacks’ coaching search, “A complete disaster. A 30-for-30 level disaster.”
Brandon Walker of Barstool Sports said Arkansas had hired Georgia’s “water boy” and that the “entire SEC collectively laughed” at the hire.
Except nobody is laughing now. Pittman took over a moribund program that had lost 19 straight SEC games over two-plus seasons. His predecessor, Chad Morris, who was one of those trendy offensive “innovators” that are all the rage, was fired after two seasons in which the Razorbacks were 4-20 overall, 0-16 in conference play.
In just his second season, Pittman coached the Razorbacks to a 9-4 record last year and for the first time in school history the Hogs won all three of their trophy games against LSU, Texas A&M and Missouri.
“We love Coach Pittman because he’s real; he’s a blue-collar, no-nonsense guy and yet he’s inspirational,” says Steve Gunter, an avid Arkansas fan and Orlando restaurant owner who arranged and hosted Pittman’s appearance at the Orlando Touchdown Club. “He loves Arkansas as much as we love him. He’s one of us.”
To borrow the coach’s own catchphrase, Yessir! ... Sam Pittman is a testament to hard work, perseverance and never giving up on your dream.
He’s also a lesson to all those pie-in-the-sky athletic directors out there.
Sometimes when hiring a college football coach, a program can create a tidal wave of momentum without ever even making a splash.