I took the first step in getting rid of the bad taste of last season by renewing my 2019 season tickets and donation 
It actually made me feel better, along with continued good news on recruiting front. I think we can actually get past this, it may require a 12 step program though 
It’s a process.
Not happening overnight.
I renewed as well and upped my contribution… glad to do my small part to help with the process.
RD, “It’s a process, not going to happen overnight”
I think most all Razorback fans understand that, but how many years should such a process take?
We play in what most consider to be the best conference and division in all of college football, have a passionate fan base, tremendous facilities.
Shouldn’t Arkansas be able to compete every year in recruiting given these facts as long as we have the right salesmen making this pitch to the 4 and 5 star recruits around this country. I understand that the state only produces a limited number of D1 recruits each year and you have to be able to secure those every year.
I think it to be a total failure of any coach at the University of Arkansas that going forward can’t recruit at a minimum a top 20 class or better every year.
We have much to sell and offer the top recruits and they need to start capitalizing on all of those tools in the toolbox.
For goodness sakes, take the Penn State scandal and two year bowl ban, reduce scholarships, two coaches and as near death penalty imposed on that Football program. Yet, with all that was imposed upon them they did not suffer through a single loosing season. 2012 8-4, 2013 7-5, 2014 7-6, 2015 7-6.
The NCAA cut their signing classes to 15 per year with a total of 65 players on scholarship for their roster and yet they never had a loosing season.
I don’t believe it’s too much to expect that Arkansas Football should have the ability to build a program at the very least can attain bowl eligibility every single season and anything less than that standard going forward should be considered failure.
I’d say that by the end of season 2021 if we have gotten to bowl eligibility then and then for the first time the powers that be would need to do a deep evaluation of the program and it’s leaders. Obviously, my hope is that we are winning by that time and none of that will need to take place.
Go Hogs!
I think Penn State is a different situation than Arkansas. It is a lot easier to win in the Big Ten, as Bret Bielema demonstrated. Plus, Penn State hired two excellent head coaches in the aftermath of Joe Paterno’s firing. One might win a Super Bowl this year.
Arkansas did not make the right hire after Bobby Petrino was fired. Time will tell if the current coach will fare any better.
Penn State starts in a different place than we do. Pennsylvania is a hotbed of high school football talent and has 12.8 million residents. PSU could do very nicely signing nothing but Pennsylvania kids who grew up dreaming of wearing those ugly blue uniforms. We don’t have that luxury. In addition, PSU has been the preeminent CFB program in the Northeast for decades. There are 59 million people within 250 miles of Happy Valley (and that’s just in the US; parts of Canada, including much of the population of Ontario, are within that radius and there are Canadians on the Lions’ roster). That’s more than four times the 250-mile radius population for UA. Looking at their roster, they hit the Northeast but also Ohio, Virginia and Maryland; half of Ohio, all of Maryland and much of Virginia is within that 250-mile circle.
If Alabama had a situation similar to Sandusky, they’d take a hit for a couple of years then get back to or near the top quickly, because they’re starting from a different place. PSU did too. I think their head coaching hires helped too; O’Brien and Franklin probably succeeded faster than some other coaches would have. What has mystified me is how USC, in the center of the largest cluster of football talent in the country, has not returned to the top with the exception of the one Rose Bowl win since the Reggie Bush mess. But bad coaching hires (like Elmo’s mancrush Joey Freshwater) probably explain most of that.
I played with the radius-population tool online (which is developed by the business school at Indiana) to see how much we’d have to expand our circle to get 59 million people. The answer is a radius of 475 miles. Since the area of a circle is pi*R-squared, the area we have to cover to recruit the same number of people is 3.61 times what PSU has to cover.
None of which is to say that we can’t recruit well. CM and staff are proving that. But we don’t have the huge regional talent base (Penn State is two spots below us in the Rivals rankings despite only 16 commits, and is above us in 247; they have 14 4-stars to our 8 and 1 5-star to our 0 according to 247) and have to work harder and smarter to get there. Then we have to take what we recruit and win in a league where they cut your throat and drink your blood.
I have lived Georgia now for 50 years and I agree with matt and swine. In a radius of 100 miles from my home, there will be 40 high school football players from this area playing college football next year. That does not mean the Hogs cannot play well in the SEC, but it does mean the other schools have an advantage in recruiting, no question.