FAYETTEVILLE — All too often Arkansas fans have believed that special teams didn’t get enough attention in the recent past and contributed to a program that has won only 8 of its last 36 games.
That shouldn’t be the case under new Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman, who hired Scott Fountain to take over that role at Arkansas.
Fountain spent three years at Georgia, the last two as the special teams coordinator, and was the special teams coach and an assistant at Auburn from 2012-2016 after spending four years as the Tigers’ player personnel director.
He added a grad transfer kicker in Duke's AJ Reed on Thursday night. Reed was 15-of-18 on field goals with a long of 51 and was perfect on 34 PATs.
“I think it is real important to have a special teams coordinator because it puts a focus on it,” Fountain said. “My job is to just worry about special teams. I am not going to worry about tight ends or the running backs, just the special teams. I think that is a really big deal.”
Fountain had two first-team All-American specialists the past two seasons at Georgia in kicker Rodrigo Blakenship and returner Mecole Hardman.
Blakenship was named the Lou Groza Award winner as the nation’s top kicker in 2019 while Hardman led the SEC in punt return average (20.1), was fifth in kick return average (25.2) and was named to the ESPN All-America first team in 2018.
Georgia punter Jake Camarda ranked sixth nationally last season by averaging 46.8 yards per boot.
“I’ve been very blessed to have some great kickers and return guys, but we have also worked extremely hard to have great special teams,” Fountain said. “We will do the same thing here.”
Expect to see plenty of starters on special teams at Arkansas next season, according to Fountain, who has coached in national championship games in 1997, 2010, 2013 and 2017.
“My thought is if you are a starter on offense or defense, we still would want you to play for us on two units,” Fountain said. “If you are a guy that plays sparingly, you will be on three or four.
“Mecole Hardman, who played for me at Georgia, he was a punt returner, a kick returner, but also a kick gunner for us. He was one of those guys that could play on three teams even though he was playing wide receiver. I know we have some guys in the program here that can do that, too.
“We may have someone who doesn’t play on offense and defense that could be on four teams. At the end of the day, we are going to have the best players out there so that every time we punt a ball or kick a ball it will be a positive situation for us.”
Fountain’s focus when spring practice starts on March 16 will be evaluation and making sure he has at least three options at kicker, punter and long snapper.
“As we go into the spring, I am really going to try and evaluate if we have the right guys here,” Fountain said. “That is going to be our focus, but we are also going to add because I always want three kickers, three punters and three long snappers in the program by the summer and then try and go with who our best players are.”
Arkansas loses kicker Connor Limpert, but now has added Reed and a pair of freshman preferred walk-ons in Rhett Thurman of Cabot and Vito Calvaruso of Jefferson City (Mo.) Helias Catholic.
Thurman enrolled in January and will go through spring practice while Calvaruso is slated to arrive on campus in June.
“When I first got here, we had two kickers and then one kicker (Jared Sackett) shortly left,” Fountain said. “So I thought we had to go out and find as at least one kicker and we would like to get two more.”
The Razorbacks are bringing in preferred walk-on long snapper Eli Chism of Shreveport (La.) Calvary Baptist to help at that position along with returnees Jordan Silver and Jordan Oehrlein.
The current punters on the roster are Sam Loy, Matthew Phillips, Chad Stephens and Thurman.
“We have two long snappers in the program and I feel like we needed to add someone there,” Fountain said. “In the punting area, we have three or four there that are actually on the team, so I have to really evaluate them this spring and see if all four are good players or do we need to bring somebody else in this summer.”
Fountain has a philosophy when it comes to kickoff returns and changes in the rule.
“Kickoff returns, I think they have really changed the thought process on everything about two years ago,” Fountain said. “It used to be if you fair caught it, you got the ball where you caught it. Now if you fair catch it, you are at the 25 yard line.
“So you kind of approach it two different ways now. Some say we are just going to fair catch everything, which is not going to be what we are. You don’t see that a lot, but you do see it some.
“The second way is that we have seen a lot of teams that say, ‘We are going to get our return guys where he has kind of a comfort level with what a 4.0 hang time is.' If we are getting a 4.0 hang, we will fair catch it. If not we are going to bring it out.
“That is kind of what we will be, but there are also going to be times when we say we are just going to bring it out and see what happens.”
Fountain will emphasize sure tackling and positioning on his punt coverage team.
“For us with punts, we are really going to try and create a solid coverage unit,” Fountain said. “We can talk a lot about blocking and protection and demeanor, but we have got equate it as a coverage unit. We have to make a web around the returner at different levels.
“So much of what goes into the coverage units are the punter and kicker. If the punter can place the ball where we ask him to place it, we can talk about tools of tackling and tools of coverage."
He wants speed on the kickoff team.
“We want to play fast. We want to be down past the 30 when the ball is being caught and we want to be able to play what we call 1-11,” Fountain said.
“What is 1-11? We want the 1 to be as good as the 11. We don’t want anybody to let us down. If we can do that, we feel like we will have really good teams.”