blackrose it looks to me like he's struggling to recruit the kind of pass blocking linemen he wants right now. MOst of the good ones he has had on campus this spring immediately committed elsewhere after the visit. Cam Feldt went from a solid verbel to soft. I'd guess if he gets into a quality senior year he'll go after a Big12 offer. Jordan Rainey has no other offers so I'm not sure what to make of that other than Arkansas might be the only place that knows about him.

Arkansas as a state has historically been a run first highschool state. I guess the 7 on 7 tournaments and Gus Malzhan advancing the way he did lead to more passing and more spread in Arkansas highschools. I think it's a pretty easy transistion in highschools b/c defenses are pretty much nonexistent anyway. My highschool was a running team forever, tried to install the spread a couple years ago, it crapped out and they went back to the wing-t in the middle of the year. I know we aren't talking about 100% spread but Petrino has a much more complex scheme so he's going to need better caliber linemen then Nutt had to run what he wants and win. If Petrino decides he needs to stay in a more conservative ground game to survive, then I hate to say it but Nutt did that as good as it can be done.

UA has traditionally recruited it's instate linemen pretty well and redshirted them and developed them into solid players by year 3,4,5. It appears Petrino is trying to go another route. Who knows if a drop back style will hold up against the front 7's of the mighty SEC but if I had to make a bet on it i'd bet it never comes close to living up to what Arkansas fans think it will. It hasn't worked for Spurrier so far at SC and I see no reason why it would work well here.

I think Ark needs to be a running smash mouth team that doesn't take alot of chances downfield. IF they can adopt the approach "get to the 4th quarter with a chance to win" I think they can remain competitive. Petrino is already saying that at 09 media days and when he was first hired he wanted to "attack the field and score everytime we get the ball"
Those philosphies contrast.

This post was edited on 8/8/09 at 9:02 pm

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Posted by blackrose890

Fayetteville, AR

Member since Apr 2009

6315 posts

Posted on 8/8/09 at 10:47 pm to wildrebeltime

Thats how linemen are supposed to be brought into the system unfortunately lack of depth and poor recruiting in the form of our former coach have left need for the "odd" things you're seeing.

Cam isn't soft on his verbal according to his interviews and statements. Futhermore, I'm not sure what Rainey is, but if he's like Brandon Mitchell who apparently is a bit of a ball player then I don't mind. We aren't struggling at all in recruiting that I can tell our commits look great from the tapes I've seen.

There's a reason Petrino is focusing his recruiting out of state to address your second argument. Anyway the spread isn't what we're stocking linemen for.

Nutt was predictable, not smart by sticking to the run at the expense of QB development, and went to the run because he "knew" he would be there forever and get that AD spot.

Under Nutt we were never a smash mouth team. Smash mouth football is defined as three yards and a cloud of dust. Where as we were a 1,2,3,punt or 1,2,TD team. We had speed backs that played off the zone block to hit big yardage once in a blue moon. When MJ came in we adopted a misdirection Zone Radar offense based on deception and zone blocking. When Dmac was on campus we zone blocked and let him run like a bat outta hell in space on the outside handoff and fed Felix a speed sweep.

That fact that you've written off "your team" to be worse than USCe is mildly disturbing as well. Give it some time and a little bit of faith and what this team can do in the future.

And for what it's worth both Leon and Winston made it to campus.