FAYETTEVILLE -- Sam Pittman has not made any promises about win totals or turnaround time during his first week on the job as head coach of the University of Arkansas football team.
But he has stressed one key facet he'd like to instill in the program right away.
"We're going to pride ourselves on our toughness," Pittman said at his introductory news conference Monday. "There's a lot of ways to learn, but it's hard if you're not tough every day to continue to be tough. So we have to instill fight and toughness in our program.
"I'm not saying it wasn't there. I'm not saying that. I'm saying my belief, our belief, is that we're a hardworking, blue-collar, tough, sic'em football team. The only way you can do that is to go do it."
Former Razorbacks said the program had been struggling for a number of years dating to a couple of years before the departure of Bret Bielema after the 2017 season.
"I think in the Bielema regime, where things started falling apart is when he lost Sam Pittman and he started losing wholesale," former linebacker David Bazzel of KARK TV and 103.7-FM, The Buzz said in November after Chad Morris was fired. "You have recruiting deficiencies that can happen when you don't get good assistant coaches who maybe aren't the best recruiters, and it starts snowballing to where your evaluation process may not be as good. It's sort of like the perfect storm."
Bazzel said he felt player development began to wane in 2016.
"I think that's what happened," he said. "I think those last couple of years of Bielema, their evaluations in recruiting -- plus their development -- just fell apart. I'm not sure where you point the finger there, it's just a fact.
"When you walk out and look at the team physically, from Bielema's second and third year to those last two years and Chad's first two years, you see body wise that something changed."
Former Razorback tight end D.J. Williams, also of KARK TV and the winner of the 2010 Mackey Award, pointed to a leadership deficit in the past couple of years.
"When I look at Chad Morris: Great guy, loves football, loves his players," Williams said. "I think he missed out on those details [of demanding accountability] because maybe he was a little too concerned with wanting to be everybody's friend. I think what comes with that, it gives players a sense that if they don't do their job at a high level, if they miss out on this or they kind of slack here or there, their friend's not gonna really come down on him."
Williams compared his take on that aspect of coaching with what he and his teammates felt under coach Bobby Petrino.
"We knew if we slipped up in any form or fashion, didn't even go full speed in a walk-through during offseason workouts with Petrino, we were gonna get ripped," he said. "At first it became a thing of fear, then it became respect. Then it became an accountability thing where the coaches stopped having to say anything.
"I remember one day Jarius Wright got in Greg Childs' face, telling him to finish the drill. It was just amazing how things like that carry over to a whole football program from top to bottom."
Williams said the accountability quotient fell off under both Bielema and Morris.
"I couldn't tell you how many times I would go to a practice with coach Bielema and just get very frustrated with how lax everyone was at the beginning of practice," he said. "I think there's a very limited amount of players in the country that can have the ability to flip the switch, just because they're so talented. I didn't think Arkansas at that point in time had those type of players on the team. So you needed people who always had the switch turned on. I think that just carried over into Saturday."
The Razorbacks have finished 2-10 in each of the past two seasons, have lost 19 consecutive SEC games and have not gone to a bowl since 2016, when the Hogs blew a 24-0 halftime lead in a 35-24 loss to Virginia Tech in the Belk Bowl.
Pittman was in his first year at Georgia at that point. The Razorbacks went bowling in his second and third years as offensive line coach under Bielema, beating Texas 31-7 in the Texas Bowl after the 2014 season and whipping Kansas State 45-23 in the Liberty Bowl the next season.
Speaking on the Paul Finebaum Show on Friday, Pittman said, "I really believe that Arkansas is the greatest job in the country. The state of Arkansas loves the Hogs. It's a very, very special place and when I was a kid ... I grew up about 75 miles from here. I was a Hog fan back then, and just have never really lost the love for the Arkansas Razorbacks."
Pittman said "just hard work" is the only way to reverse the Razorbacks' fortunes.
"I told them in my interview I think we have to recruit our way out of this thing, and I think we can," he said. "We have very fine facilities here and a great administration, so there's really not a reason why Arkansas can't get back to the glory days.
"We needed to have the money to hire assistant coaches, they gave it to me, and we needed to have the support of the administration and the chancellor, and we had that, too. The facilities are here. We just have to get kids on campus, and I think we can certainly help ourselves once we get them on campus because there's not a lot of people who truly know what we have here at the university."
Sports on 12/15/2019