re: Arkansas fans: do you miss Petrino?

I thought Petrino was a great coach, and I enjoyed the years that he was here. However, by the time he left, I had pretty much written off any possibility of him ever beating Alabama. Petrino could breeze through every team on his schedule, but Nick Saban beat the damn brakes off of his team every year.

Do I MISS Petrino? For awhile I missed winning 10 or more games a year, and at one point last year I was convinced that we were going to have to fire Bielema, but he got it turned around and things are looking up. At the end of the day, Petrino screwed himself out of a pretty good gig here at Arkansas, and our PROGRAM is in better shape now. The recruiting (while still being around the same nationally) is better. Bielema has a much lower attrition rate than Petrino had, and he does a much better job addressing needs at every position. Petrino tends to recruit a SHITLOAD of wide receivers (I think we had like 18 scholarship offers for receivers that Bielema stopped recruiting when he got here, no shite) at the expense of talent on the back half of his defense.

At Arkansas, Petrino had teams that could throw the ball all over the field, but often times you'd see an all-out gunslinger war between both teams because our pass defense was beyond terrible (Georgia in Fayetteville comes to mind).

In the end I think that Bielema is going to build a program that is better suited for long term success and will win a lot of games himself.