FAYETTEVILLE — Alter the final five minutes of Arkansas ’ road game at Kentucky and expunge the offensive pass interference penalty during the frantic finish of the Ole Miss game.

Then imagine the possibilities for Arkansas football in 2008.

Had the Razorbacks not suffered their stunning collapse after dominating Kentucky for 55 minutes, and had London Crawford’s pass interference call disappeared and a field goal of medium range been executed, Arkansas could be sitting at 6-4 today with games against Mississippi State and LSU available for postseason jockeying.

Instead, Arkansas is 4-6 during this open date and must win at Mississippi State on Nov. 22 and defeat LSU in Little Rock on the day after Thanksgiving to be bowl-eligible.

There, in a nutshell, is another example of the fine line between winning and losing in major college football. The Razorbacks were clearly not ready, as most analysts correctly predicted, to factor into the conversations for national contention or the SEC races.

“We’re not as good as I wished we would be. We’re not as good as I want to be. We’re not as good as we’re going to be,” Arkansas Coach Bobby Petrino said. “We certainly have gotten better as the year has gone on.”

The contrast between the 10-year Houston Nutt regime and the first season of Petrino is a stark one. Arkansas players were asked to commit themselves to a tougher, more rigorous work ethic and a higher practice tempo.

“He’s a tough coach, old school, tough coach,” junior defensive tackle Malcolm Sheppard said.

“You’ve got to be a tough guy,” junior safety Matt Harris said. “That’s what he’s been insisting on the whole time. Tough, tough, tough.”

The transition has not been entirely smooth for the Razorbacks.

“Any time you come in and implement a new system, you’re going to have those that buy in because of the excitement of something new, and you’ll have those that are opposed, and normally the opposition is from those that have been in the system for a long time,” cornerbacks coach Lorenzo Ward said.

“You don’t find that a lot with the new guys, so there were some barriers we had to cross with some of those guys.”

Defensive coordinator Willy Robinson estimated about 80 percent of the Razorbacks have jumped on board the Petrino way.

Apparently a large percentage of the players who haven’t bought in will be on their way out at the season’s end.

“It’s been a tough transition for those seniors, been in the system all this time and now all of a sudden they’re facing this,” Robinson said. “We’ve had a few of those kids that are buying into it... the leaders who have worked their way up through the ranks, but we’re not quite there at 100 percent like we need to be.”

Petrino felt the Razorbacks had emerged from the 1-2 punch of playing Alabama and Texas on consecutive weekends and had begun showing steady progress right up until last Saturday.

In Arkansas’ 34-21 loss at South Carolina last week — the team’s eighth consecutive playing date — Petrino thought the Razorbacks slipped backward both in terms of playing physical and executing assignments. This week the plan is to practice harder and re-instill Petrino’s “grind it” mentality.

“It’s being mentally tough and physically tough, and as you get used to the coaches you definitely get used to his way of coaching and all this,” sophomore linebacker Freddy Burton said.

Sheppard, the team’s only junior team captain, said he thought the Razorbacks were close to playing the Petrino way.

“I think we’ve come a long way this season, from game one to now,” he said. “I think we’re real close to what he expects out of his team.”

On Wednesday, the Razorbacks worked in full pads and emphasized their middle drill and inside runs, good barometers of toughness.

“Coach Petrino definitely made it a point to come out here and get some new fire, some new passion, and I think we showed that in practice,” redshirt freshman defensive end Jake Bequette said.

“Today’s practice, I wasn’t there for inside run, but it sounded like football,” Robinson said.

Petrino said the Razorbacks had “a ways to go” to fully embrace his practice philosophies, and he brought out an anecdote.

“For example, we have offensive linemen and you put them on the sled and they’ve got to hit the sled,” Petrino said. “Sometimes their mindset is ‘It’s hard and I’ve just got to get through this and this is punishment,’ and we’ve got to get to the point where, hey, this is a necessity. ‘I’ve got to do this every Tuesday. I’m going to get better. I’m going to keep my pad level down and this is how I improve.’

“ So we have a ways to go, coming out and getting that mindset where we want it. But we have improved a lot as the year has gone on with our practice habits and with the tempo that we’re practicing at, but I just think that the idea that I’m going to get better on my details is not there yet.”