For a team with a 1-1 record, there are a lot of Arkansas fans ready to just throw up their hands over the entire season and just see how basketball turns out with John Calipari.
It’s obvious from Razorback coach Ryan Silverfield’s post-mortem with the media Monday after a stunning 43-10 loss to Utah on Saturday he’s not paying attention to what we’re writing and saying in the media.
He just flat said it.
“As an individual I don’t read what you guys write,” he said, “I put my head down and work.”
Coaches from junior high to the NFL level have said that same thing for 60 years.
When I was in Dallas writing about the Cowboys quite a bit, Tom Landry used to laugh and tell us he didn’t have time to read what we were saying.
That lasted until his wife, Alicia, let the cat out of the bag about how he seemed to know all the stuff that was being written.
We assumed it was Gil Brandt, who seemed to know everything going on in Dallas as soon as it happened including stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with the Cowboys.
A Dallas flashback with Tom Landry
“I’ve never seen Tommy read the newspaper,” she said innocently one day around a bunch of us media folks. “I read the sports in both newspapers to him every morning at the breakfast table.”
Us guys at the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Morning News along with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram all looked at each other and just laughed.
We all knew what she had just blown the cover about without even trying.
We have no idea if Silverfield is being told by his wife what’s being written and the sports information director, Kyle Parkinson, probably isn’t going to bother him with it unless he deems it essential.
Most of it isn’t.
But he hears about it.
There’s no way he can avoid it unless he runs around with his hands over his ears muttering so he won’t hear what people are saying.
Silverfield owns the loss, then pivots to trust
Silverfield admitted the bottom line to the loss and general negativity around the program right now.
“Everybody in this program didn’t do a good enough job,” he said. “I understand that. Rightfully so, there should be people that should criticize the performance out there on Saturday.”
If he’d stopped right there it would have been better, but then had to start sounding like a typical coach talking to a high school booster club meeting and talk about continuing to root for the Hogs.
“There’s not enough time to worry about those opinions,” Silverfield said “I want our players to find ways to continue to improve. As long as they’re doing that and there’s belief within our locker room, the belief with the way we go about our program and the process and being able to trust that process, we’ll be OK. Where I would be concerned is if that process was no longer being trusted. But we’re two games in.”
Silverfield is 46 years old and to some of us old-timers that’s a youngster.
He’s still got that eternal optimism along with a nice contract with a good pay-off if they relieve him of it early.
That’s paid off for a lot of coaches around the Hogs.
Results will decide how this season is remembered
“In my 28 years, there’s a lot of people who have tried to write my obituary,” Silverfield said. “Guess what? They haven’t done so yet. We’ll keep coming out swinging. I plan on doing this thing for a long time and find ways to improve every week.”
While all that may sound good to some folks, there’s a lot of Razorback fans not buying into it right now.
The only way to fix that is to win.
How he climbs that mountain this year will determine how rough his winter will be more than the unpredictable Northwest Arkansas weather.
Those excuses right now are all he can come up with.
How long it will last depends on results.
