By Chris Marler
It’s hard to get college football fans to agree on much. It’s even harder to get SEC fans to do so.
It’s easy to find things or people that are universally hated by SEC fans: fat free ranch dressing, Notre Dame, and learning to eat, or spell, quinoa. Finding something they all universally love is a rarity.
Not with Sam Pittman though.
Pittman is like if a three day weekend or extra fry you find in the bottom of the bag after leaving Chick-Fil-A were a person. Everyone loves those things. The same goes for Pittman too. Whether it’s the molasses-like way he talks with a southern drawl, or talking about which “Col’beer” he’s gonna celebrate a win with, the Boss Hog is a favorite everywhere.
Quite frankly, it’s about time someone defended him in addition to just liking him.
As he talked at the podium on day four of SEC Media Days, I realized two things. One, Sam Pittman’s entire career perception from outsiders is skewed because of so many caveats. And two, there may be no better argument to be made for how difficult the SEC is week in and week out than Arkansas under Pittman.
Sure, the resumé isn’t great. He’s 30-31 overall, 14-28 against the SEC, and just 7-22 against Top 25 teams.
Pittman has just seven wins against ranked teams as a head coach with 22 losses. That also means 22 of his 31 total losses were to ranked teams, over 70.9 percent. Think about the lengths people go to insist that Mark Stoops is better than his actual record simply because he’s at Kentucky. Keep that same energy for Pittman. Nearly half of his overall games at head coach were against ranked teams (29 of 61), and if that wasn’t frustrating enough for a first time head coach and a team trying to get over the hump, realize that 17 of those 31 career losses were by one score or less.
Sam Pittman isn’t cracking any Top 10 or Top 25 college football coaching lists right now. It’s hard to justify that happening given how his career looks on paper. But my goodness are there a lot of asterisks and/or additional info that help paint the actual picture.
In a week where the national media and Power 4 commissioners once again got into incessant debates about the regular season schedule, Sam Pittman should have been front and center.
In his first five seasons, Arkansas played 29 games against ranked opponents. That’s not only the most in the SEC. It’s seven times more than the next closest team. To give some perspective, that’s more than Penn State and Michigan have played combined during that same time span. Additionally, Arkansas faced at least four Top 25 teams in their first six games of the season in each of Pittman’s first three seasons. If that doesn’t sound unique or challenging, remember that twice in the last three years we saw a Big Ten team go into the month of November before facing a single team that was ranked or had a winning record.
Despite that, both were still ranked in the Top 5 of the polls. We all know SEC bias and what not.
I personally wish Arkansas would give Sam Pittman a lifetime contract.
In general, I wish coaches like Sam Pittman were given a little more credit where credit is due. More than anything, I wish he was used as an example to paint a much more accurate picture of his own schedule and record and the caveats that need to be mentioned in regards to their success.
Instead, we are left with praising people like Indiana’s Curt Cignetti for going undefeated against a month-long parade of lifeless G5 schools. All the while, Cignetti and several others from the B1G keep turning whispers into shouts about the SEC being overrated, bloated off inflated strength of schedule numbers, and the absolutely despicable fact that they play FCS teams in November. Gasp!
The Week 13 cupcake game has basically become an Uno reverse or get out of jail free card that supersedes everything else in this argument. Just this week, Indiana and Cignetti cancelled their fourth Power 4 future non-conference opponent in the last two years. And to the shock of no one, they replaced all four with FCS teams.
For those keeping score, in the next five years Indiana now has 13 non-conference opponents scheduled. Four are FCS teams, zero are Power Four, and zero will be played away from home.
None of this is a secret.
Indiana openly changed that game to an FCS opponent because they wanted to win more games. That’s fine. It’s exactly what they should do.
It’s not what Arkansas has done though. Texas, BYU, Cincinnati, Oklahoma State, and Notre Dame were all on Arkansas’ schedule over the last five years. Four of the five were ranked. That was in addition to playing an SEC schedule that included six games against Alabama and Georgia in the first five years. Again, all of this was while his job security waned, health was on the decline, and oh by the way, 139 players left in the transfer portal including 102 in the last three years alone.
Unlike baseball and basketball, Arkansas football hasn’t been the hammer meeting the nail or perennial favorite against lesser programs. They are an ant under a microscope on the hottest day of the year, over and over again.
There’s been no privilege or feeling sorry for Sam Pittman. No breaks in the schedule or dodging cross-divisional opponents. Just a 12 game minefield to navigate with a ceiling of 7-5 season at the Liberty Bowl and a floor of, well, unemployment.
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