No one has said Utah did anything wrong, but they knew some of the plays Arkansas was trying to run in that 43-10 blowout Saturday night.
The Utes watch film, too. The Razorbacks apparently had seen it, too, but for some reason the offensive linemen apparently couldn’t fix what coaches had pointed out to them in the opening game against North Alabama.
“After our first game, it was very evident that our tackles were giving away run-pass,” Hogs coach Ryan Silverfield told the media in Monday’s prss conference. “It’s something you kind of notice in game.
“You mention it to them, ‘Hey, when it’s pass, you’re sitting straight up.’ Nothing that every college football — I mean, even coaching DIII, everybody does the exact same thing. You have tells on every team.”
Opponents aren’t blind, either. They probably weren’t selling out on it, though. Utah’s coaches probably had it as one of those “if they do this, then …” type of deals.
They probably didn’t expect the Razorbacks to do it again. For whatever reason the Razorbacks didn’t get it fixed enough because the Utes were apparently sitting on it. They aren’t going to bother correcting the Hogs during the game.
Bigger problems plague the run game and passing attack
Maybe the worst thing in all that is it wasn’t anywhere near the biggest problem for Arkansas in the game from an offensive standpoint.
It was a struggle to run the ball and the receivers haven’t been able to consistently get open through the first two games. That’s not from picking up tendencies alone. They just don’t appear to be very good.
“Is it the inability?” Silverfield said. “Those are the things you go back and you say, ‘okay, where can we put ourselves in a better situation? How can we find different route concepts? Is there something different we need to do? Is it more motions, more shifts? Is it finding different ways?’”
He knows full well where fixing it starts. Silverfield’s taking the blame probably because he’s not going to throw his assistants under the bus.
“That’s our job.,” he said “You know, we’ve made some adjustments in-game, but clearly not enough to have this success.”
We may not know if it gets fixed or not this week. No. 2 Georgia is coming to town and Kirby Smart has some of the best analysts and coaches in the country and they have the track record to prove it.
It will be put into their position but they are probably going to have some assumption the Hogs will make a better effort this week to fix the problem.
Georgia brings a tougher test this week
“Georgia’s certainly looking at us, getting a scouting tendency,” Silverfield said. “‘Hey, when they do this, it’s 86% run.’ Well, after one game, there’s going to be high tells of those things. Credit to everybody that’s game-planning, but it’s something that’s been a part of college football for a long time.
“Again, something that we noticed ourselves Week 1, and that was the game film that we were watching off of our two guys that we made the improvements on.”
Even getting it fixed may not solve things. Georgia is quite capable of still letting folks get open and the offensive line won’t be able to give quarterback KJ Jackson the amount of time to throw he’s had in the last two games.
If Silverfield doesn’t get the running game going at least a little bit that won’t really matter.
They don’t have a prayer if Jackson is the leading rusher this week.
