Arkansas Has a Bigger Problem Than Its Head Coach

Arkansas fans have sat through enough fresh starts to know that changing the head coach only matters if something else changes with him.

This is a free excerpt from The Football Notebook. To read the full article, click the link below.

Georgia’s 45-17 win over Arkansas wasn’t much of a football game, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of filling space. Georgia showed up in Fayetteville, realized fairly quickly that Arkansas wasn’t going to provide much resistance and essentially treated the game like a particularly well-attended Saturday practice. At one point, the Bulldogs’ offensive and defensive linemen were apparently using television timeouts to get extra work in because the actual game wasn’t providing enough of it. I cannot think of many more depressing ways to describe the state of a football program than the other team decided to squeeze in some practice reps during commercials.

The empty seats probably said more about Arkansas than anything that happened between the lines. Fayetteville is supposed to be one of those places where college football consumes the weekend, so watching large portions of the stadium sit empty for an SEC game against Georgia should concern everyone involved. Fans didn’t suddenly stop caring about Arkansas football. If anything, they’re staying home because they care enough to be completely exhausted by what it has become.

I don’t think most of that anger is directed at Ryan Silverfield, either. Sure, there are probably a few people who decided they were out on him by halftime Saturday because college football fans are college football fans, and somebody somewhere has probably already identified the perfect replacement on a message board. Most people understand Silverfield inherited this mess. He has been in Fayetteville for a matter of months; the frustration has been building for closer to 15 years.

Arkansas has hired new coaches before, and every change comes with another invitation to believe the Razorbacks have finally figured it out. Sometimes they even provide enough evidence to make that belief feel reasonable for a while before everyone eventually ends up having the same conversation with a different name occupying the office. There are only so many times you can sell people a fresh start before they begin wondering why the starting point never seems to change.

And Arkansas should not be this hopeless. Nobody is asking the Razorbacks to become Georgia, because asking basically anybody to become Georgia is a good way to spend the next decade miserable. But this is a program with a fan base that desperately wants to support it, located in a state where finding wealthy companies is not exactly an elaborate scavenger hunt. Arkansas doesn’t need to become a permanent national championship contender for people to feel good about the direction of the program. It just needs to stop making competence feel like some grand ambition.

That responsibility extends well beyond Silverfield. Arkansas has changed the person wearing the headset enough times to know that another coaching search cannot be the answer to every problem, particularly when so many of the same problems seem to survive each change. Eventually, the people making the hires and deciding how the program operates have to answer for why the results keep looking so familiar.

The folks are pissed off — excuse my language — and they have every right to be. They’ve heard about plans before and waited through rebuilds that eventually led to another rebuild. Empty seats against Georgia aren’t evidence that Arkansas fans have stopped caring. They’re evidence that asking them to keep proving how much they care while giving them so little in return has finally gotten old.

Something has to change, and for once, Arkansas might want to start somewhere other than the head coach’s office.