Some thoughts after long cooling off period..........

Football Insider Board
#1

…just one man’s opinion.

  1. For SEC games and, this year, the TCU game, we will mostly play teams with higher rated recruits than ours. One reason CBB is a good fit for Arkansas is he has proven to be good at coaching up low stars into playing like high stars. For CBB’s system to work we have to play smart and hard to help compensate for lack of talent, if we hope to win.

  2. Last Saturday, we caught a more talented team who was healthy, fresh and really focused after a bye week rest and after we beat them last year. Bad timing there as we were coming off two very tough games and eight consecutive games without a rest. I firmly believe we got Auburn’s best game to date and they got our worst.

  3. We all like to say that “stars don’t matter” and then we get all excited when Sosa Agim, our one and only five star, commits to play for us. Auburn had two Sosa Agims playing as full grown upper classmen in their D-line, with several younger just as good recruits supporting and backing them up. They dominated our offensive line. The same thing happened against A&M and Bama where there are first round draft choices at several positions on each of those defensive lines. Three great SECWest defensive lines and three losses.

  4. There will be great athletes on Florida and LSU’s defensive lines too. Hopefully, not as many and not as extremely talented as these three teams we have already played.

  5. So, I think we beat Florida after two weeks to rest, heal, and reload. We probably don’t beat LSU and end up 8-4 for the season and 9-4 if we win our bowl. That would be a good result for a rebuilding year. Not as good as we were hoping after the TCU win, but very respectable.

  6. If that happens, we will finish 5th in the SEC West. If we were in the SEC East, we would have dueled for the top spot. Same in the Big 12.

  7. If Austin’s injury is more serious than they are pretending it is, we will be doing good to get bowl eligible. Hope he just has a slight strain on his knee and will finish the season healthy. He definitely deserves that and much, much more.

JMVVVVVVHO

#2

  1. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect for me on BBs ability to coach up players. Just haven’t seen or at least recognized it if so. On the other hand, he or any decent coach should be able to take a truly underrated recruit, “coach him up” and make him look and play like a much higher rated player. Because in reality that’s what he is, just didn’t get the recognition he deserved. And even if BB can “coach them up” there will likely never be enough of them to make a lot of difference on a teams performance overall. Not many really good players, even if underrated, fall through the crack.

  2. and 5. The couple of times I’ve seen Fla they had a pretty salty defense. Offense does struggle some. I don’t expect anything different after the by week. With our OL flagging as it has been doing I wonder if we can score on them. Or at least enough to win the game. IMO, Fla and LSU are good teams, better than us for sure; I don’t see us winning either game. We have had some really bad games against the last two opponents over the last two or three years. Think we will lose one of them although as the better team, we shouldn’t.

#3

I respect your clear and concise reasons for disagreeing with some of my points. I do think Bielema has a better ability to find an occasional diamond in the rough (J.J. Watt), or find a new and better position for a player to adapt to (A.J. Derby) than a lot of coaches. His success at Wisconsin was with lower rated players than many of his competing Big 10 teams. We certainly could lose out. Doubt we win out. Hope that we can upset Florida and win the last two on the road. All bets are off if Allen is out.

#4

Jack Crowe may have summarized your thoughts in his tweet: “Arkansas has accepted mediocrity”.

#5

perhaps he just got lucky with Watt (see Jamaal Anderson who came to Arkansas as a WR) and the fact that Derby “played” QB for year before finally changing to his natural TE position does not help the case (not CBB’s fault that Derby was stubborn though).

#6

Oh, the irony.

#7