Arkansas Fires Sam Pittman
This coaching search provides Arkansas with an opportunity to change the narrative.
The Arkansas Razorbacks are officially on the hunt for a new head football coach.
Finally.
At 12 p.m. yesterday, Arkansas announced that it had terminated the contract of Sam Pittman. The Razorbacks lost 56–13 to Notre Dame on Saturday afternoon, and that was apparently enough to justify paying the roughly $9 million buyout on Pittman’s contract. Sometimes all it takes is a little embarrassment for the money people to come to their senses and pull the trigger.
From a fan perspective, it’s been clear for years that the direction the program was headed under Pittman was untenable. Arkansas won nine games in 2021, including rivalry contests over Texas, Texas A&M, LSU, and Missouri. For many programs in the SEC, getting to nine wins wouldn’t be enough, but at Arkansas—a program that was in the absolute dumps because of Chad Morris’s disastrous tenure—accomplishing that task was more than enough to warrant high praise.
Then the bottom seemingly fell out overnight. Arkansas couldn’t keep up in recruiting and the transfer portal because it lagged behind the times with NIL. As the roster’s quality diminished, so did the results. The Hogs started 2022 3-0, but lost a heartbreaker to Texas A&M in Week 4 and couldn’t recover, ending the season 7-6 with losses to BYU and Liberty sprinkled in there. The 2023 campaign was an abject disaster as the team went 4-8, and it could be argued that Pittman should have been let go after that season. He wasn’t, and 2024 became make-or-break. Apparently six wins in the regular season were enough for him to keep his job. Spare me that nonsense.
I’ve long said that if a coach’s performance is bad enough to warrant firing in the middle of September, he probably shouldn’t have started the season with the job in the first place. Arkansas’ performance through five games was indicative of that. Two brutal losses on the road to Ole Miss and Memphis, and then the disaster-fest against Notre Dame encapsulated everything that’s wrong with the football program as it currently stands. Terrible defense, untimely mistakes, and poor coaching decisions that result in close losses—Sam Pittman was 7-19 in one-score games and 32-34 overall—have defined Arkansas for years, and that was never going to change this season.
2025 will go down as a wasted campaign for Arkansas because now, even with Bobby Petrino as the interim head coach (more on that in a bit, I promise), what are the odds that this team can get off the mat and compete for a bowl? With the difficult schedule plus a terrible defense that’s seemingly quit, I’d say those chances are near zero.
The end-all, be-all of Pittman’s firing is that while Arkansas was never expected to win the SEC with him at the helm, it was expected to at least be competitive. It’s safe to say that it wasn’t even close to that for the better part of three seasons.
The tenth-largest crowd in the history of Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium witnessed Saturday afternoon’s debacle against Notre Dame. By halftime, I’d wager that roughly half of those attendees had hit the exits. Notre Dame is a good team that played for a national title last season and could make the College Football Playoff this season. However, there’s no universe where the Arkansas football program should be letting go of the rope and quitting in a big-time spot with its season on the line and its head coach’s job hanging in the balance. When the people responsible for ponying up the cash for Pittman’s buyout saw the fans leaving in droves in the second quarter, the players not giving a crap on the football field, and the coaches seemingly having no answer for those first two problems, they wrote a check for $9 million and handed it to athletic director Hunter Yurachek and told him to find them a new head football coach.
So, what now?
One question that’s been rattling through my brain since Saturday’s game ended is, “Is the Arkansas job attractive?”
On one hand, there are only 16 jobs in the SEC, and Arkansas is one of them. Whoever takes this gig is guaranteed life-changing money and an opportunity to coach in the best conference in college football.
On the other hand, winning at Arkansas is extremely difficult for obvious reasons. The local recruiting base isn’t as talent-rich as others in the league, and as such the Razorbacks have to compete with more prestigious programs for players. It’s usually a losing battle—and understandably so. If you’re offered the same amount of money to play at Texas or Arkansas, it’s a no-brainer: you’re heading to Austin most of the time.
That’s just the start of the issue, though. Arkansas invests heavily in basketball and baseball, which takes away from the football program. Let me be clear—there’s nothing inherently wrong with caring about winning in basketball and baseball. Folks in Arkansas care deeply about both sports and would love nothing more than to compete at a high level on the court and on the diamond. But let’s not get this twisted: Arkansas is a football state. That’s what matters most to those people.
The problem is that the people in charge seemingly can’t get it through their heads that football should be the number-one priority. To me, it almost seems as if they’ve resigned themselves to the fact that they can’t win SEC titles, so they’ve decided that investing elsewhere makes the most sense. While that might seem rational to some, I’d argue that if you can’t compete in the league you reside in, then maybe you shouldn’t be in that league in the first place.
Arkansas makes far more money being in the SEC than it would have had it stayed in the Southwest Conference and subsequently the Big 12. But since joining the conference in 1991, there has been zero consistent success in football. Sure, there have been blips of winning, yet those always fade as quickly as they arrive. Time and again, Arkansas has found itself in the bottom third of the league, and if that’s the standard, then just leave the SEC altogether and find a place where you can actually win football games.
OK, I’ll get off my soapbox. I haven’t been around the Arkansas fan base long, but I know that they desperately want to see the Razorbacks win. All it takes is one look at the crowd of 75,111 people who packed in to see the Hogs get their skulls caved in by Notre Dame on Saturday. Those people care deeply about this team. The least the program could do is provide them with a winning product.
Bobby Petrino is once again the (interim) head coach at the University of Arkansas—in 2025. What a world.
If you had told an Arkansas fan ten years ago that Petrino would be the coach of the football program again after what transpired back in 2012, they’d have plugged their ears and called you insane. Well, here we are. For anybody unaware of why this is all so crazy, CBS Sports wrote a quick refresher about the whole saga that you can read here.
In the statement announcing Pittman’s dismissal, Yurachek said that Petrino would be considered for the full-time job. I believe it. The last time Arkansas was relevant on the football field was when Petrino was at the helm, and even though it ended poorly, there’s probably a large contingent of higher-ups and boosters who have bought into the lie that since he did it in the early 2010s, he can definitely do it again in 2025. I call bull-hockey on that.
Still, Petrino is trying his best to win people over, and the mass firing of defensive coaches this morning tells me that he’s going to do whatever it takes to turn this ship around and prove he can still win. He has seven games left—five of which are against teams currently ranked in the AP Top 25—to prove he still has it.
I believe it’s unlikely that Petrino ends up with the job. The most likely candidate to take over, in my opinion, is SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee. The Mustangs have been revitalized since Lashlee took over for Sonny Dykes following the 2021 season. He’s 31–14 on the Hilltop and made the CFP last season in the team’s first year in the ACC. He’s long been considered a name that could be in the mix for some of these bigger jobs, but with his ties to Arkansas—he’s from Springdale and played for the Razorbacks from 2002 to 2004—the match might be perfect.
Whether he wants it is another question. It could be argued that SMU has more resources than Arkansas at the moment. It’s also easier to win at SMU than in Fayetteville because of the arduous SEC schedule he’d have to face. But as I mentioned at the top, the money he’d receive would be life-changing, and he’d also be able to say that he’s one of only 16 people to have a head-coaching job in the SEC. For some, that alone would be worth it.
Other names to keep an eye on include Texas State head coach G.J. Kinne, Florida State offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn, North Texas head coach Eric Morris, Purdue head coach Barry Odom, Memphis head coach Ryan Silverfield, UTSA head coach Jeff Traylor, Tulane head coach Jon Sumrall, and South Florida head coach Alex Golesh. I consider the last two unlikely because they’ll probably pursue better jobs elsewhere, such as Auburn or Florida. As for the rest, I’m sure Arkansas will do its due diligence with most, if not all, of them.
I firmly believe that winning at Arkansas is not a pipe dream. With the right head coach and enough resources, getting to eight or even nine wins is not impossible. But things need to change. This coaching search provides the university with an opportunity to completely rewrite the narrative surrounding the football program. If it goes all in and flips the script, the Hogs could be looking at something special over the next ten years. If not, the doldrums they currently find themselves in will continue. For the sake of everybody I know who loves Arkansas football, I hope the former scenario occurs.