re: Arkansas, what are the expectations in football for the 2017 campaign?

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Point being, who has actually coached at their pay grade in the SEC this year? There is Saban and then a low return on the investment everywhere else. SEC Sucks now

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The SEC is mediocre this year indeed… for the first time in, what 15 years or something? That's indicative of a whole lot of nothing when looking at the bigger picture. Maybe the bigger picture is not yet visable to any Arkansas fan in terms of Bielema's tenure here, I can accept (and hope for) that. The troubling thing is Bert's first year was so bad it re-wrote our team's book on being terrible, and the next three years have been mediocre.

This has become a problem for me. Even though we were simply out-gunned in '14, we showed improvement throughout the year. Then in '15 and '16, we squandered opportunities to actually have respectable seasons because we either:

1) Dropped games to critically under-talented teams; something we really can't be making a habit of in a conference that's generally excruciatingly tough.
2) Let manageable games get out of control at the hands of teams only marginally better than us.
3) Or blew sizeable leads in the third and fourth quarter.

shite happens sometimes, even to great coaches. Unfortunately, when your results have been as underwhelming as Bert's, you can't make a habit of things like Missouri and Virginia Tech in consecutive games. When things start going south in a Bielema-coached game, they seem to always snowball. I'm tired of being able to predict the future in Hog games when a couple of mistakes are made. A muffed punt, interception, or blown coverage on a single big play and it seems like a mortal blow is dealt to the team more often than not. The theme of the past two seasons has been Jekyll and Hyde.

The conference WAS actually kind of pitiful this year. This could have been a great opportunity. We're in the fourth year of our coach, and rather than capitalize on this, he was a contribution to the problem. We gave up a 24–0 lead against Virginia Tech. We gave up a 24–7 lead against a Missouri team that was worse than our '13 squad. We lost to an 8–5 Texas A&M team by three touchdowns. We lost to an 8–5 Auburn team by 53 points - our worst conference loss ever if I remember correctly. We lost by four touchdowns to an 8–4 LSU. These teams were not THAT good, why did so many 8-win teams look like conference champions against us? Then we narrowly escape losing to TCU and Ole Miss, two teams with losing records. And let's not forget our thrilling one-point win from behind against LA. Tech to avoid losing to a G5 team two years in a row (and three our of four years under Bert).

The salt in the wound is that there is absolutely zero sense of urgency in all press releases. Bert has two more years minimum thanks to a poorly drawn contract. He fires a dude at Wisconsin after one game, but he's holding onto half of our defensive staff who have been consistently a liability? Maybe he deserves more time, but how long can we honestly keep this up? Nobody wants to go see their 7-win team get its arse kicked in over half of its conference games for a decade. I accept that Arkansas is a tough job and our expectations need to mirror that, but our head coach can't constantly lose the way he's losing and then deadpan the camera like he's annoyed at the idea of accountability. If he wants the continued support of Razorback fans, he doesn't have to win all the time. All he has to do is keep the hope alive, give us a reason to look forward to the next game and the next season. I've dreaded every single game since Texas State, every last one.

And all I can think about is how the only P5 football programs in the nation that would keep a coach after these results for four straight years are the likes of Indiana, Purdue, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, etc. And none of them would pay him 4 million dollars along with handsomely generous assistant salaries. We play in the SEC. We have a stadium bigger than most college football teams and a surprising amount of money. Whether Bert stays or goes, we need to either give off the air that we're at least trying to keep up or we need to get the frick out.