re: Something that needs to be said about football

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We will have the 16th- to 18th-ranked recruiting class this year. Good for ninth in the SEC. This is the core of the issue.

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This is definitely the actual elephant in the room. It’s hard to dominate when most of our seniors look like UGA and Bama’s incoming freshmen. It’s become a next-level deficit and we are doing right in NIL in basketball, but I question if we ever will in football or if it would even matter at this point. We needed to get out early. I will say, most of our guys NIL for like UAMS, etc. is very classy, but we’ve got to be dropping CASH if we want to compete in recruiting(which is still a crap show). And for those who think that we wasted on the basketball team last year, we didn’t. We still overcame a ton of injuries with a super young team, played a lot of talented teams, and made the sweet 16 by beating a powerhouse #1 seed and it wouldn’t have happened with scrubs.

They do play in a very weak division but unlike Arkansas they didn't have peaks and valleys with each hire they had.

They hire a Chad Morris and they fall off quickly. No matter what conference they are in.

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Baseball recruits across the nation and the instate talent wasn't as good when DVH first got here. It is much better now that the program started winning big.

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I was talking to a co-worker yesterday about baseball in the Bryant area. He was telling me there's teams there that's called the Bryant Blacksox. They have various teams from I think 7 year olds to 13 (I might be off a tad on the ages).

Anyway, he was telling me that there are college coaches that show up to their games. We are talking 13 and younger kids. That's crazy to me.

Drink up baws

I'm not going to say it hasn't improved, but the baseball talent in state wasn't as abysmally far behind comparatively as it is in football when Dave got here. He was still able to compete on a national level with a team mostly made up of Arkansas kids.

There's a 0% chance of doing that in football as things stand. It's just not an apples to apples comparison. Football is so much further behind.

Something else to think about is last year we still weren’t that far off from having a really good season. We lost 4 games by a combined 9 points and one of the other losses was to alabama and the other was Mississippi state without our starting qb. And Pittman has still fielded the 2 most competitive Arkansas teams vs alabama than anyone the last decade since the kody Walker fumble game. If we don’t have a multitude of injuries in a single unit causing us to have one of the worst secondaries in football last year we probably win 8 or 9 games but then again that’s life as an Arkansas fan.

I get that basketball has had more overall success lately, but we finished tied for 8th in the SEC in football last year while we finished 10th in the conference in basketball but most consider it a successful season because we won a few games at the end. The tournament is obviously the most important part everyone focuses on but football doesn't ever have that opportunity - you're stuck in a crappy bowl game no one cares about unless you finish top 4 or so in the league.

It's just tougher in general to appease fans in football I guess. The year before last we finished 4th in the SEC in basketball while we were tied for 5th in football - not that far apart. We went to the Elite 8 and also won our bowl game but the Elite 8 carries a ton more weight.

Texas and Oklahoma will have to worry about not getting buried in the SEC. If I was them, I would have stayed in the Big 12 where they can always win more games.

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We will be lucky to make a 12 team playoff once every 20 years or so

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I actually think we'll pop into the top 12 every now and then. I hate it for the sport, but that change is probably the most beneficial for us specifically that they've made since they started changing everything.