re: Arky fans..seriously, where did it go wrong with Bielema?

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I'm not an Arky fan, but I might be one of the few remaining Bielema fans. I think Bielema tried to build a football team the right (or what I consider right) way -- developing a fundamentally sound team that punished you in the trenches and used the ground game to open up the QB play. Just basic tried-and-true football, nothing flashy. He tried to emulate Saban, but he lacked Saban's defensive coaching acumen and Saban's recruiting prowess, and the SEC is brutal on teams that lack good recruiting.

Now I'm going to make a completely unsubstantiated wild guess as to why he declined -- he came in when the rest of the SEC was adapting to Bama and LSU's style of football, which meant the SEC was getting better at taking on teams like the one he was trying to build. I admit this isn't actually a well-documented theory, but it makes some sense to me.

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And... you would be mostly wrong.

Not on the style of play being impossible to run (though very few high schools in Arkansas run that system). Its on the he failed because the SEC had adapted to the Bama/LSU style of play.

Bielema failed in three ways.

Effort. He honestly believed, and it was part of his coaching strategy... that players and coaches should take it easy in the off season so they would be fresh for the final month or so of the season. Which was a great strategy in the Big 10. In the SEC it meant that by the time your team got into game speed you already had a couple of SEC losses.

Conditioning. His holy mantra, which his S&C coach shared with him, was bigger is better. Not stronger is better, but bigger. He preferred to add pounds over speed and conditioning. So not only was our defense gassed by midway through the third quarter but you had things like Alex Collins, who is now showing he can run away from NFL speed, being bulked up to the point where he couldn't run away from college speed.

Flexibility. Bielema could not change. Giving huge cushions on the WRs when he was a DC was the way to go. And he stuck with it, even though teams could not wait to get a 3rd and 3 against us because our DBs were at least ten yards away from the line of scrimmage. Do we play better going fast? To bad. Is our O-Line coach not cutting the mustard? Give him another three or four years.

He was fat, lazy, and stupid.

The thing is, while we are putting the boots to him now... Arkansas fans really wanted Bert to succeed. We liked the big oaf. But it was like hiring that guy you really like to a vital job and discovering that he was too shiftless to bother doing the job you hired him to do.