FAYETTEVILLE — Following his team’s first scrimmage of the preseason, Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman said the Razorbacks weren’t yet in game shape.
On Tuesday, Pittman elaborated on that statement and said a team’s game shape is determined as much by its mental state as physical. He said he is pleased with his team’s conditioning, but wants to see players be able to move past bad plays quicker.
“A lot of times you’re in shape, but your mind won’t let you go because you’re thinking of something that happened, mostly bad if a big play just happened on you,” Pittman said. “Your mind affects your whole, entire body. We have to be a mentally tough team, and if we can continue to work on the mental toughness, then mentally I think we’ll be in better shape.
“I believe we practice hard, I believe we have plenty of conditioning, but we have to mentally be stronger so we can work through those situations. I don’t think we’re necessarily in bad shape, I just think we have to be a stronger football team, mentally.”
As a result, Pittman said coaches have put the players through much more physical practices this week, including Tuesday indoors at Walker Pavilion.
“The one thing we’ve done is we’ve incorporated a lot more one-on-one — tight end-linebackers, O-line-linebackers — one-on-one competition,” Pittman said. “I think you can find out a lot about a man if he’s in a one-on-one situation and there’s nobody to blame. He can’t blame the left guard, the corner, the safety. We’ve put them in a lot more one-on-one situations just to see how they react. If they get beat, I want it to bother them, and if they win, I want them to be happy about it.”
Pittman said it is important to tailor workouts toward improving weaknesses.
“You can’t just say, ‘OK, well, we’re going to go out there and do the same thing and get better,’” Pittman said. “You have to make specific drills for those guys to get better. You can’t bench everybody and be mad at everybody. You have to work to get better.”
Asked whether not being able to go through spring practice affected the team’s overall shape, Pittman said no. He said the team’s understanding of his expectations was hurt most by the lack of practice time prior to the start of preseason camp Aug. 17.
“You don’t know your football expectations until you get out there,” Pittman said. “They are high. Understanding that standard has helped them.”
Assessing the overall shape of his team, Pittman said the defense “fatigued faster” than the offense in Friday's closed-door scrimmage, “and therefore they got outplayed.”
Pittman said that had not necessarily been the case in practices leading up to the scrimmage. He indicated the defense — in particular the defensive front — has outplayed the offense in the two practices this week.
“We’ve got to bring that intensity in practice…to a game-type situation, which is what a scrimmage is,” Pittman said. “I think we will, I’m very confident we will, we just didn’t (in the first scrimmage).”
Quarterback Feleipe Franks, who threw four touchdown passes during the scrimmage, said defensive players “fought” during the first scrimmage, but said it’s difficult to play defense against an offense going as quick as the Razorbacks did.
“With that kind of tempo it’s hard if you’re not in shape or one of those things,” Franks said. “Not saying that they’re not, but we were going play after play and it gets hard. So they did a really good job. I thought it was a good competition day on both sides of the ball.”
The Razorbacks are scheduled to practice again Friday, 22 days before the season opener against No. 4 Georgia. Pittman said he expects players to be “amped up quite a bit” for the scrimmage, expected to be inside Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium.
“We certainly can’t go into a ball game playing the way we did with the entire team,” Pittman said.