Tim Cramsey isn’t the only reason Arkansas offense is struggling

Arkansas has four games left. Three of them get played before anybody could make a real change on the coaching staff.

So I’m not sure what all the Tim Cramsey talk is supposed to accomplish right now.

Fire the offensive coordinator this week and you haven’t fixed the offense. You’ve just found somebody to blame.

The players get thrown under the bus. So do the rest of the coaches and whoever signs off on the move.

Midseason coaching swaps don’t have much of a track record. The new guy gets the same players and about a week to change anything.

A bowl game is different. An assistant who’s been in the building all year moves up for one game and everybody knows the deal.

November isn’t a bowl game.

Arkansas has tried this before

The Hogs did it in 2023. Sam Pittman fired offensive coordinator Dan Enos before Halloween.

Bobby Petrino got the offense later. That season still didn’t get saved.

I go back a little further than that. When Ken Hatfield was coaching here, Frank Broyles was the athletic director and wanted some of Hatfield’s assistants gone.

Hatfield wouldn’t budge. That was one of a handful of fights those two had.

Next thing anybody knew, Hatfield had taken the Clemson job sight unseen. It caught just about everybody off guard.

That’s the trouble with coaching friends. Hiring them is easy. Showing them the door is a lot harder.

Cramsey started running Ryan Silverfield’s offense at Memphis in 2022. When Silverfield got the Arkansas job, Cramsey packed up and came along.

You can understand why Silverfield trusts him. You can also see why some fans think that’s the problem.

The numbers aren’t pretty

I won’t pretend the offense has been any good. The Razorbacks are putting up 19.63 points a game, and nobody in the SEC scores fewer.

They’re at the bottom of the league in yards, too, at 336 a game.

That scoring number ranks 125th in the country. Every other Power Four team does better.

The Hogs managed 10 points against Missouri last Saturday. A week earlier, they’d beaten Vanderbilt 31-21 on the road, so go figure.

Then there was the fourth-and-1 against Mizzou. The snap to Cam Settles hit the ground and Missouri scored a touchdown off it. Silverfield said he’d call it again.

He didn’t sound as calm about the rest. “The turnovers are just inexcusable,” he said. “And then the seven drops. Those are things that just cannot happen.”

Somehow all of that landed on Cramsey. Some stories say Silverfield ought to cut ties with him. Others have moved right on to who the interim or the next guy should be.

Who actually calls the plays

Silverfield explained how it all works at his Monday press conference.

The week starts with the whole staff. “We’re all part of putting together the practice plan, and that ultimately creates the call sheet on Saturday,” he said.

Once the game kicks off, it’s mostly Cramsey. “But in-game, for the most part, Tim is calling it,” Silverfield said.

Silverfield’s not just standing there watching, though. He jumps in on game-day changes and big calls, and short-yardage plays get talked over.

He stood up for his coordinator, too. “But I have great faith in what he’s going to do and what he is doing,” Silverfield said. “Ultimately, he’s got the ability to call the play and put us in the right situation.”

So if the plan comes from the whole staff, the head coach owns a piece of it. Fire Cramsey and that piece doesn’t go anywhere.

Silverfield did leave the door open. “I’m evaluating every single thing every single day — wins and losses and all of it,” he said. “Whatever it takes for us to be successful, we’ll do.”

The names don’t add up yet

Oklahoma didn’t wait. The Sooners fired offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle on Monday.

That’s Oklahoma’s business. The names getting tossed around for Arkansas aren’t on this staff, and a few haven’t been around the program in 20 years or more.

Nobody knows if they’d even take the call.

We also don’t know how these last four games are going to go.

Lining up a replacement before the season’s over is just guessing.

And it puts a lot of weight on a decision that can’t be made yet anyway.

Maybe it’s the players

I keep landing in the same spot. This might not be a scheme problem or a coaching problem.

Seven drops didn’t come off the call sheet. The turnovers didn’t either.

These guys are playing hard. I don’t doubt that. But playing hard and being good enough to stack up SEC wins aren’t the same thing.

Maybe that’s a pointless argument. Arkansas has a long habit of going after the coach and the athletic director first.

The thinking always seems to be that the players are fine and just need somebody new pointing the way.

That almost never works out.

Firing Cramsey with four games left won’t add one better player to this roster. It’ll just move the blame around.