Smith inherits supported Razorbacks
FAYETTEVILLE — John L. Smith listed 45,200 good reasons why he has a good shot at successfully succeeding former Arkansas Razorbacks coach Bobby Petrino this football season.
Because while Petrino had a big impact on the University of Arkansas’ football program that he coached for four years, building off an undermanned team’s 5- 7 season in 2008 to improve to 8- 5 and the Liberty Bowl, 10- 3 and the Sugar Bowl and 11- 2 and the Cotton Bowl these last three years, the Razorbacks remain bigger than any who coach them.
With Petrino fired for what athletic director Jeff Long termed “reckless” misconduct throughout the scandal you no doubt know by rote leading to the coach’s April 10 dismissal, and nobody yet named to replace him for this 2012 season, 45,200 turned out for the annual Red- White intrasquad game concluding spring practice April 21 at Reynolds Razorback Stadium.
The turnout set a Razorbacks spring game attendance record. It underscored to Smith, named April 23 as head coach on a 10- month interim agreement, that he was returning to a special place. Smith, 63 and the former head coach at Idaho, Utah State, Louisville and Michigan State, was Arkansas’ special teams coordinator/ outside linebackers coach from 2009 into December 2011 before becoming the head coach at Weber State, his alma mater that he left for the unique opportunity Arkansas offered these next 10 months.
The uniqueness multiplied 45,200 times two days before it was announced Smith would head from Ogden, Utah, back to Fayetteville to coach players he’s already coached and knows well and coaches he’s worked with including coordinators, Paul Petrino on offense and Paul Haynes on defense, who had been on Smith’s staffs elsewhere when he was head coach.
“Everything’s in place here,” Smith said. “You’ve got a good football team. We’ve got great coaches. We’ve got the best fans in the world.
‘ What a neat deal, 45,000 for the spring game. Just shows the attitude and the resilience of the Razorbacks out there. Let’s just all lock arms and forge ahead and go win a championship.”
It won’t be easy, not with national champion Alabama and Southeastern Conference champion LSU not only in the same conference but the same SEC Western Division.
However, with the fan support these players share, and the belief they share in a staff stayed intact and the belief they share in each other and in senior leaders Tyler Wilson, the 2011 first- team all- SEC quarterback, and Knile Davis, the 2010 all- SEC running back rebounding from injury, on offense and end Tenarius “Tank” Wright on defense, there is a “we can do anything” air about this team as it academically wraps up the semester and heads into summer conditioning under a coach they both respect and like.
There’s also an unmistakable air of additionally proving “we can do anything” with their former coach lodged in past tense.
While certainly respected for his coaching and the records his methods achieved, Petrino’s profanely harsh style did not make for a coach for whom some liked to play. Especially it seemed the ones on offense whom Petrino most directly coached and thus most berated, but apparently even those on defense, too.
“It wasn’t just Bobby made me, you know what I mean?,” outstanding second- year senior linebacker Alonzo Highsmith, a strong John L. Smith advocate, said. “I’m going to come
to work because that’s what’s the right thing to do.”
Positively reinforcing Smith’s positive reinforcement just accelerates the work ethic, Highsmith said.
“The whole team is happy coach Smith is coming back,” Highsmith said. “He’s a great coach.”
A coach knowing he arrives with great sup- port simply because he arrives at Arkansas where even with no coach in place support is a matter of record.
“What better testimony then the spring game?” Smith said. “A record crowd. You talk about the fans coming out and supporting these guys, this football team, this program, it’s outstanding. We have to make it a special season.”