The mission was to gain material for a spring football advance for Hawgs Illustrated, but what it really turned into was a chance to get to know how Sam Pittman handled his first three months as Arkansas’ head coach.
The interview happened before it was known spring football would be delayed until at least mid-April as a result of the covid-19 virus. Arkansas athletics director Hunter Yurachek said the practices would not be able to conclude by the scheduled final practice on April 25 without a waiver from the NCAA.
"That will be one of the things we ask the NCAA as a conference for, some legislative relief," Yurachek said. "Whether that happens during the month of May or if there’s some coaching that can take place in the summer that normally cannot happen in the sport of football, as well as for soccer and volleyball or other fall sports that normally would be preparing for their fall season this time of the year."
How much Pittman’s team will be able to practice is unknown, but his thoughts on spring drills are still newsworthy.
How much will the Hogs scrimmage during an ideal spring? And, how is Barry Odom, his defensive coordinator, helping the new head coach? Odom has vast experience as the former Missouri head coach.
Some of the answers to the Odom question hit home as the interview finished. Odom rolled into Pittman’s office for their daily lunch break — a brisk walk that is probably more taxing than the new duties of the head coach.
Pittman wouldn’t address his weight, noting he doesn’t get on scales. He said he’ll know soon if any extra pounds added during recruiting have been reduced on the walks with Odom.
“When I put on my suits, I’ll know,” he said, then laughed.
Aside from his duties as Pittman’s lunchtime personal trainer, what has Odom meant?
“First, he is a guy who is a great listener,” Pittman said. “You could hire a guy who has done what he’s done and it could be a guy who is telling you what to do all the time.
“Barry is a guy who listens and then if he is adamant on an issue, he might say, ‘We had success doing it like this. Would you consider looking at this?’
“He is perfect for what I needed and his personality — of course we go back 20 years — is everything I thought it would be and probably more. He was pretty high on the pole with me. He’s exceeded what I thought he would bring to the program.”
Pittman spent the 2000 season coaching offensive line at Missouri, but his relationship with Odom dates to when he coached offensive line at Oklahoma in 1997-98 while Odom played for the Tigers. Odom was head coach at Rock Bridge (Mo.) High School when Pittman was at Mizzou.
“I knew him back then,” Pittman said. “I knew he was from Ada (Okla.). I tell you what I remember, that he was a great athlete. He ran a 48.3 (seconds) in the 400, 10.6 in the 100.
“I knew he was a great athlete. When I go walk with him at noon, I tell him to slow down. I tell them all to slow down, though.”
Pittman is a good listener, too. He’s learned to listen to the good coaches he’s worked with. Asked for a list of his mentors, there was a long pause. Like he did the day he was hired at Arkansas, he mentioned Charlie Cooper, his high school coach at Pryor, Okla.
There was also this: “I didn’t work with a bad one. I took something from all of them.”
There were many mentioned by name.
“There have been a lot of people in my life who have taught me different values and different structures,” Pittman said. “As far as coaches, I’d say Kirby Smart, Butch Davis, Jim Chaney have taught me a lot.
“As far as how you should handle a practice and why, I’ve taken a little bit from a lot of people.
“It’s hard to argue with a lot of the things that they did Kirby and his guys did at Georgia. It is hard to argue with the success and things Butch had at North Carolina. I was fortunate to work with all of those guys and Derek Dooley (at Tennessee) had some good qualities.
“There were a lot of guys who taught me. Joe Novak at North Illinois was one of the finest head football coaches in the country. When he took that program, they had lost 20-something in a row, and they won 10 games, beat Alabama, Iowa State and Maryland.”
Understanding offensive line play is the key to many things that figure into head coaching decisions. That goes back to some good advice from Pittman’s dad when he became a high school head coach in Princeton, Mo., in 1987.
“My dad told me if I ever wanted to have success as a coach that I needed to learn about the O-line,” Pittman said. “That’s all he had to say, so that’s what I did.
“He said, ‘If you want to be a good head coach, you better learn what the O-line is doing.’ That was when I was a high school coach, so I just started coaching them. That’s how I became an O-line coach.”
Pittman’s role as head coach will be as the chief executive. So the obvious question: What will he do at spring practice, if and when it takes place?
“I’ll be heavily involved in the special teams part of it,” he said. “As far as practice, I see myself traveling during the individual segment of drills at different positions. I’ll be the voice of all offense and defense when we go to team.”
Some of the specifics will evolve because he’s never done it.
“I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I know what my mind says I’m going to do, but I’m being very conscious that I’m not an offensive coach. I’m the head coach. To be honest with you, I’ll probably spend more time early with the defense.
“We tape everything. We film every drill, everybody. I will watch every bit of that.
“Early, I’ll probably be a little bit more in tune with the defense and then as that goes I’ll be able to talk about every thing with every individual. As we see things specific that we need to do better, I’ll go to that specific drill and see if we have improved. I’ll try to be as much help as I can.”
The three coordinators — Kendal Briles on offense, Odom on defense and Scott Fountain on special teams — act as head coaches of their areas, Pittman said. In addition to his special teams role, Fountain, who coached with Pittman at Georgia, is also assistant head coach.
“We hired really good guys, really good coaches and that’s their job,” Pittman said. “I’m not going to handcuff them with their job. I’m going to help them.”
What kind of help?
“It can be different things,” Pittman said. “They are so into schematics and fundamentals, there can be things as simple as we need to change the snap count more or we need to play base (defense) a little bit more. Let’s see who we have. We know we can get there with stunts and blitzes, but let’s see who we can play man on man.
“Offensively, we may not be seeing enough movement. Whatever it is, I’ll put that into practice.
“I want everyone to know down and distance. So we have to have what we call chains — which means first-and-10. Then after that I say down and distance on the fly.”
Pittman said he wants the entire team to understand down and distance, and to do that you have to practice it.
“There are a whole lot of things, like when do we put in short-yardage offense, short-yardage defense,” he said. “Those are things I need to help with.”
What will practice tempo be like? Will there be teaching periods?
“Individual is the time the best time for you to teach what you are doing,” he said. “You can slow that down at times. Practice tempo is going to be fast. Team will be fast.
“We have tempo in our practice. Some parts of our practice are going to be extremely fast. Some parts are going to be slowed down, but when the ball is snapped it’s fast. There will be teach periods that will be slowed way down, because we are teaching.
“Whether or not we slow it down or not, we have to teach our guys to surround the football on defense and have to teach our guys to run the ball on offense. We can’t be running back to the line of scrimmage or running back to get in our position on defense when we need to be running to the ball. That part has to get done.”
Pittman’s background has been on the offensive side of the ball, but he knows what has won in the SEC, especially of late. It’s defense. It is probably not a surprise that he’s going to spend a lot of time with the defense.
“Georgia is known for their defense. Alabama is known for their defense. They all have great offenses as well, but they stop people,” Pittman said.
“We felt like we would go address that. Our guys did a great job of getting guys in and recruiting them.”
There have not been many position changes so far. One of the major moves involved a mid-term freshman arrival, Hazen’s Blayne Toll, who signed as a potential defensive end but was moved to tight end a few weeks into the winter program.
“If there is someone else playing a different spot, it’s because I didn’t know where they played last year, but I think that’s it,” Pittman said.
“With Blayne, basically, we saw his athletic ability. We had a little bit of a need over there. We are going to look at him a little bit.”
Toll’s move gives the Hogs four at tight end. He joins Hudson Henry, Blake Kern and Nathan Bax. A walk-on, Bax transferred from Illinois State after school started in the fall.
Pittman raves about the work Jamil Walker’s strength and conditioning staff has done with the team this winter. The team is bigger almost to a man.
That was in response to a question about weight gains in the offensive line. Pittman said it’s not just the offensive line, but throughout the team.
But as far as the O-line, he said, “I’ve been really pleased with that whole group. They’ve gotten bigger. They work hard. I’ve been pleased with the whole team, but the O-line has worked hard.
“As far as weight gains, they are striding and getting in that direction. To a man, they have all gained some weight. It’s good weight.
“We cut one week of the running program out so we went five (days lifting) and three (days running), instead of four and four in our offseason program. We thought their confidence was getting better, their bodies were getting bigger so we wanted to concentrate on weight gain and strength a week longer than what we had earlier planned.”
There were specific questions about some interior linemen like guard Ricky Stromberg and center Ty Clary.
“Stromberg is up over 300 pounds and Ty looks good to me,” Pittman said. “I don’t know individual weights, but we don’t look near as small as when I first got here.
“Coach Walker does a great job in his staff. They made great gains in there.”
As far as day-to-day operation of the team in his first three months as head coach, Pittman said there have been issues to work through, but some of them are good problems.
“We’ve had people try to hire our coaches,” he said. “That’s because we’ve hired good people, good coaches. There have been several have opportunities to leave, but they have not.
“I’m real excited. You go in phases in coaching. You have your eight-week program in the offseason, then you have spring ball. I feel like we won the eight-week program. We’ve got accomplished what we set out to get accomplished.
“Recruiting was the same way. We put numbers on recruiting what we wanted at a certain point here, a certain point there. The guys exceeded those numbers.
“Now we’ve put numbers on next year’s class what we want at this point and that point.
“We put down what we wanted in the eight-week program. We know what we want to get done in spring ball.”
What is that?
“I’d rather not say,” he said. “That’s between me and the staff. I’ve answered all the questions, but that one I’m not going to say. When you put something out like that, then there will be some who look at it and say you have problems.
“So I go through it with the staff. Each player will get a goal from what we want to get from them. The staff will be the only ones who know what we need (as far as team goals) in spring.”
How would he describe the last three months?
“It’s been the best three months of my life,” he said. “I’m the head coach at Arkansas.
“I don’t know what I thought it would be, to be honest.
“We were really busy before I got the job. We played the Saturday before I played on Sunday. We were trying to win the national championship at Georgia. We got beat by a really good football team in LSU.
“You don’t have time to think during the day about Arkansas. You are trying to do the job you have.
“There wasn’t really any thinking about how it was going to be. I had a plan on how I wanted to hire coaches. I had a plan on how I wanted to talk to the kids and what I wanted to say to them.”
In most respects, he’s evaluated that good people were in place and he let them do their jobs.
“To be honest, we have really good help, really good people,” Pittman said. “That’s what it’s about in all aspects. Without all those people helping me, my job might be difficult. We have the best at what they do all around me.
“So it’s outstanding to work with those guys. If you are around people who are good and passionate and want to be the best at what they do, your job becomes much easier — if you allow those people to do their job.
“If I was better than Barry Odom at calling the defense, I’d go call it. If I was better than Kendal, then I’d go do that, too. If I was better than Kyle (Parkinson, communications director), I’d do that, too. But I’m not. But I’m comfortable with that, too.
“I want to hire the people that want to be the best at their job. Like for me, I wanted to be the best O-line coach in the country. So when I’d get a call from around the country to see if I would take a coordinator job, in my mind I didn’t know if I could be one of the better coordinators. But I knew I could be one of the better O-line coaches. So I didn’t want to take a chance.
“I thought I’d be a much better head coach than I would be a coordinator. I knew I could be a good head coach.
“When I got this job at Arkansas, I knew I was ready for the job.”
Are the quarterbacks ready? It’s the question most ask first, but it fell well down the list on this interview. Pittman does not think Franks, the Florida transfer, or Jefferson, a redshirt freshman, will be held back in almost any situations in the spring.
“Franks is getting pretty close to healthy,” Pittman said. “He’s doing everything.
“We will turn him loose as much as we do quarterbacks. He’s full, ready to go.”
Jefferson might be “limited somewhat. He’ll practice every practice. We are still looking at that.”
The plan for the spring is similar to what’s happening on most SEC practice fields.
“We will scrimmage three times,” he said. “Obviously, we have the right to tackle if we want. There are number restrictions on that, but we can thud, go live or how we want to do it.
“Right now, we have three live tackle scrimmages in the spring. That’s how the people I’ve worked with have done it. It’s adequate.
“They can get more tackling in individual time to add on to that. Obviously, you need to tackle and you need to see (running backs and receivers) hold onto the ball when they get hit, too.”
What will be the daily message to the team during the spring?
“It’s the same thing we say all the time,” he said. “It’s toughness. There is mental toughness, there is physical toughness, there is attitude, there is the way you compete.
“We talk to them all the time about those things. We are trying to relate it on and off the field.
“We will treat them like a man. I want the development toward a young man.
“Whatever I say I want it to be the truth. Kids are smart.”
Is toughness taking hold?
“It’s not too early to see it,” he said. “From when I got here until now there seems to be a big change that they are starting to take to who we are and what we are about. A big part of that is the strength program.
“Our coaches know how to talk to kids and motivate them. To be honest, they have seen them a lot more than we have — even though we spend a lot of time in (the weight room). I think the development of our team to this point, a lot has to go with the strength staff.”
Is it more than just emphasizing toughness?
“We are emphasizing confidence,” he said. “We want to show them we are confident in them because we are. You can’t do anything unless you believe that you can do it.
“I believe we can do anything we want to do. I believe that. We’ll see.
“We believe we can have a good football team and so we are trying to let them see we believe in them.”
Have leaders emerged from within the team?
“I don’t really want to name individuals,” he said. “But I’ll say this: as a unit, as a team, we’ve been really pleased with the work ethic, class attendance, pleased on and off the field. They have done what we are trying to ask them to do.
“They are doing well in school. I’ve been really proud. Sometimes you can take over a program and you have got a lot of problems, or whatever. But, our team, I hope, believes in us because they sure act like they have.”