The Year in Review (In Progress....)

So the Razorback football program is now in the midst of a "week long evaluation", "from A to Z", "beginning with me" ("me" would be Houston Dale, even though Nutt starts with a "N" which is not near the top of the alphabet, and coach starts with a "C", which is third, but I digress...).

Besides which coaches will disappear, the subject of offensive coordinator remains the hot topic. Nate Allen jumps into the fray today with a seeming defense of Houston Dale while giving credit to the confidence that Casey Dick brought to the offense and the overall team.

As I've written many times since the first of practice, I'm impressed with Casey. He struggled a bit in the LSU game but did perform pretty well down the stretch in the second half. Protection issues reigned for most of the game, which will cause a quarterback to struggle and throw the ball high. I thought the play calling against LSU was pretty hit and miss, with some really bad ideas brought in with the game plan. Again I saw pass plays that were poorly designed with little chance of success -- such as that streak up the sidelines with Monk we ran 2 or 3 times. Speaking of Monk, obviously he and Casey were not on the same page on the last, failed 2 point play. Repetitions in practice coming into play in the game situation -- yet again.

It can only remain to be seen what difference a new offensive coordinator along with the addition of Mitch Mustain might make. I do know the issue next year will not be talent at the skill positions.

The defense came on nicely during the year. Reggie Herring made me a believer. I thought the defense played well enough over the course of the year to have earned us a few more wins had the offense performed. I still see message board comments of how the defense lost us the Vandy game -- yes, they had a bad fourth quarter, true, but the offense left them on the field to die in their sweat with its lack of ability to do much more than 3 and out for most of the game. Not to mention failing to score on 4 plays starting from the 1 yard line.

Special teams actually performed pretty well for the latter half of the year. Jacob Skinner did well punting, our coverage was good, kick-off coverage was a bit hit and miss, but we did kick-off better as the year progressed.

Place-kicking is an area where we need to place more emphasis on getting some talent into the program. This "walk-on" based approach is not getting it done. Confidence in your field goal kicker can be a bit like the confidence your quarterback can give you. We "played scared" on our field goal kicking all year and it let us down when we needed it against LSU. Arkansas has a history of great, even All-American kickers. Little, Lahay, Ish, Trainor, Wright, etc. This area needs to be a point of emphasis again such as it was with Ken Turner coaching the kickers.

Game management and situation preparedness needs to improve. Clock management, apparent lack of any type of planned two minute drill, no thought given to attacking the end zone beyond just trying to run over people characterized most of the year. It ended up not making a difference in the LSU game, but we ran only 2 plays in just over a minute while supposedly in our "hurry up" offense. This endless exchanging of "packages" in order to run certain plays is a big problem -- it tips off the defense, and it takes a lot of time when we need to be in "hurry-up".

Is Arkansas football really close? It's possible. I'm confident the defense is headed in the right direction. Houston Dale is going to have to kick the coaching on offense up a couple of notches, recruit more linemen and get a field goal kicker or we'll remain Western Division also-rans. Can he do this? I suppose we will get the opportunity to see.