FAYETTEVILLE — The increased media exposure for Arkansas’ football program this year is benefitting the team in recruiting, Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman said Wednesday.
Pittman discussed recruiting for an entire segment during his weekly radio show at the Catfish Hole. He said his staff has been particularly well received in Texas since the Razorbacks defeated three teams from that state — Rice, Texas and Texas A&M — during a 4-0 start to the season.
“That’s helped us down there,” Pittman said. “If they’re a bordering state, we need to be strong there.”
Recruiting in the state of Arkansas has also improved.
“One of our biggest goals when we came here is that we wanted to make the kids in our state feel good about coming to the university,” Pittman said. “We didn’t want them to be embarrassed about, well, I’m at a pep rally and I pull a Hog hat and everybody (groans). We want them to win the pep rally. I think that’s a little bit of what’s going on now. There’s a lot of talk about Arkansas around the country and that’s a big, big deal for us.”
Viewership has been high for the Razorbacks’ three games when audience numbers were tracked. Arkansas has played in two of the three-most-watched games on cable this season, with average audiences of more than 3.8 million for the Georgia game last week and nearly 3.4 million for the Texas game on Sept. 11. Both games were televised by ESPN.
An average audience of nearly 4.1 million watched the Razorbacks beat Texas A&M on CBS on Sept. 25, which was Arkansas’ most-watched game since 2016. Non-cable networks generally have larger audiences than cable networks.
ESPN “College GameDay,” which was on location for the Arkansas-Georgia game last week, averaged more than 2.1 million viewers, which was its best number for an October episode since the show expanded to three hours in 2013. The show averaged more than 3 million viewers in its final hour, its most-watched hour in nearly three years.
Arkansas was also featured on SEC Network’s pregame show, “SEC Nation,” prior to the Texas game. Audience numbers are not known for games on that network.
“I think television certainly helps you recruit,” Pittman said. "We’ve been on 'SEC Nation' for the Texas game, been on ESPN at 6, on CBS, we were 'College GameDay,' we were on ESPN on Saturday and will be next Saturday — I think all those things are exposure for our university.”
Pittman, who was considered an ace recruiter as an assistant at Georgia before he was hired by Arkansas, cited recruiting and roster management as the two most important aspects to his job. Pittman said at 9 p.m. on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, he writes 15 notes, sends 50 text messages and calls 5 recruits.
“That’s really going well,” Pittman said. “We text the parents one night, the kid one night, the dad one night.
“Recruiting is going well. We’re received much better than we were when we walked in the door.”
Pittman also expects a strong commitment to recruiting from his assistant coaches. He said each coach writes 10 notes each day to a recruit.
“It’s a different world in recruiting the SEC,” Pittman said. “If you want your team to go beat Alabama and Georgia and Texas A&M — and Texas and Oklahoma now — you have to have people on your staff that understand the consistency of recruiting. It’s daily.
“I want our guys, when they lay down at night, they’re going, ‘Oh, my Lord, I forgot to text or write this guy.’ I want it to bother them.
"The only way you can get recruits is if you out-work people. You can have personality and all this, but if somebody out works you on this young man, they’re going to get him. Our goal is to make it where we’re so tight to him, his mother, his father, his grandmother, his dog — whatever’s important to them — they can’t tell us no.”
Arkansas, ranked 13th this week by The Associated Press, will have another opportunity to sell itself to recruits Saturday when it travels to 17th-ranked Ole Miss. The game will be televised by ESPN at 11 a.m.
Pittman said he thinks his team will be prepared for its second of three consecutive early kickoffs.
“We’re ready and we’ve practiced,” Pittman said. “I’m not worried about it all.”
Pittman chalked up much of what happened during the Razorbacks’ 37-0 loss at second-ranked Georgia to playing a good opponent on the road. He said he and his staff did not show the team its typical “good, bad and ugly” video mashup when players returned to the football building Monday.
“What I decided was we need to move on,” Pittman said. “We’ve got good coaches and they went over what we need to improve on from the game. Our players, there were a lot of tears — it was tough on us Saturday. That’s what you want to see; you want to see it means something to them, and I knew it did.
“At some point you can’t let that loss end up being two. You can’t let Georgia beat you when we play Ole Miss. We moved on.”
Pittman called the team’s practices this week “wonderful.” He said the team is replicating the practice format it used during the week leading up to the Texas game, but did not elaborate on how it differed from other weeks.
Pittman said he loves his team’s offensive and defensive game plans for the Ole Miss game, and said they will be different from when the teams played a year ago. The Razorbacks defeated the Rebels 33-21 last season in Fayetteville when they intercepted Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral six times and returned two interceptions for touchdowns.
Corral is “an outstanding quarterback,” Pittman said, but he is equally as impressed with the Rebels’ running game that averages 243.5 yards per game. Pittman said Ole Miss, coached by Lane Kiffin, has a lot of quick, fast running backs.
“You think about Lane and Ole Miss, and you think about throwing the football,” Pittman said, “but they’re rushing for almost 250 a game. We have to make them one-dimensional.”
Pittman said his team is “fairly healthy” for this point in the season and said the Razorbacks came out of the Georgia game “pretty good” in that regard.
Quarterback KJ Jefferson, who played against Georgia after injuring his knee the week before against Texas A&M, is fully healthy, Pittman said earlier in the week. Jefferson was limited in practice a week ago.
Jefferson, who grew up in Sardis, Miss., will return to his home state as a starter for the first time.
“He didn’t play last year against (Ole Miss). I’m sure it’s a big deal for him,” Pittman said. “We’ve tried to downplay it a little bit because we know in his heart and his mind he’s up-playing it.
“He’s a competitive son of a gun. I think he’ll have a good game. I think the team on both sides of the ball will rally around the fact he’s going home. We certainly hope they do.”