Arkansas ready to “make another run” in homestretch of season

Exhale.

Arkansas’ nearly month-long stretch of holding its breath finally came to an end Saturday with the Hogs’ 45-3 win over Arkansas-Pine Bluff on Saturday. The victory snapped a three-game losing streak and allowed the Razorbacks a moment of good fortune as they enter a bye week before the final four games, all in the SEC, of the regular season.

Coach Sam Pittman isn’t taking even a blowout win for granted, especially given the circumstances with which his team entered the game.

“I think honestly, we needed some, we needed to feel good again,” Pittman said. “We went through a rough stretch. Again, that’s not an excuse. That’s the truth.”

It’s a far cry from where the team had spent the previous three years before Pittman’s arrival in 2020. Blowout wins even in the Chad Morris era (even though when Arkansas played an FCS team with him as coach, it was a seven-point win) never actually felt like a positive. They were more like status quo, a holding pattern before the next inevitable disaster.

But with Pittman, a man whose positivity is his calling card, the victory was a much needed respite.

Playing in the SEC is difficult. Pittman knows as well as anyone having been an assistant coach on Bret Bielema’s Arkansas staff in the early 2010s and an assistant with Kirby Smart at Georgia before he took over the head job in Fayetteville. The timing of Arkansas-Pine Bluff and the bye could not have been better, accordingly.

Arkansas now has time to rest, regroup and recover before Mississippi State comes calling on November 6. And when the Bulldogs arrive, the Hogs will be ready.

“We’re excited about trying to make another run,” Pittman said. “Our kids believe we can do that and this game helped us toward that.”