Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey there. Razorback football game week is here. Tom Murphy in studio with me. We'll talk about the Razorback's upcoming game against North Alabama. I got some court documents to go over. That's always fun in college football. Now we'll get into all of that. Want to tell you first that our show is brought to you by Eglins Best in Arkansas. Greatness starts early, before the pads go on, before the crowd roars, the day begins at the breakfast table. Eglins Best delivers superior nutrition with more vitamin D and less saturated fat than ordinary eggs and starts strong with Eglins Best. Better taste, better nutrition, better eggs. Visit eglinsbest.com for more information. Also brought to you by Bentonville Glass. They've been serving their community since 1971. They're committed, professional and versatile. If you're looking for a quality leader in Northwest Arkansas or looking for skilled craftsmanship, look no further than Bentonville Glass for all your glass market needs with the highest quality products. You can come by and see them now at 507 South Main in Bentonville or online at Bentonville Glass.
It's game week. So we are back to a daily podcast now here we were weekly during the summer when there wasn't as much going on, although it was a very eventful summer, made for some some packed jam packed weekly podcasts. I want to tell you, if you did not hear our interview with Ryan Silverfield at the Hogs Illustrated Sports Club last week, I would encourage you to go back and listen to that. I really enjoyed talking to him up there last Thursday. Thought that we were able to get into a lot of things with him that maybe he hadn't talked about a whole lot in public before. And really I don't that's dated until after the first football game, maybe even Evergreen a little bit after the first game. So I would encourage you to go back and find that. You can find our podcast. We're on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Just search Whole Hog Sports. Also we put these podcasts on our social media channels on Facebook and Twitter and we put it on our YouTube page. Just search Whole Hog Sports on any of those platforms. Tom Murphy as we mentioned in here now we'll talk about the game that's coming up and as we record this, we're live right now on our social media channels. But as we record it for people who are listening on the podcast later, we haven't talked to Ryan Silverfield yet. On Monday when we do that, that's when we'll get information from him about the depth chart and things like that.
And we'll get to all the football stuff, but first we got to go back, I think, to last week, the temporary restraining orders that were given for or granted for Caleb Wooden and for Sean Williams, the defensive back code or the defensive backs who have gotten these restraining orders in Washington County Circuit Court.
This is kind of. I don't know how much these guys are going to play this year. They do like them for depth purposes. But this is something that we're going to have to monitor throughout the week because even though they have these restraining orders now, there is no guarantee that they're going to even be eligible for Saturday.
And really this is Arkansas's, you know, keep it local as these court rulings have really dominated the national landscape. And that's what everybody's talking about going into the full start of the season. There were some games on Saturday, but everybody gets underway this week.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Right.
Definitely have to keep up with those guys. And you know, not sure Williams had decent numbers at Dartmouth, but we know what Caleb Wooden did. And I don't know if he factors in the too deep or not. They've really rotated some guys around and I'm not sure some guys were dinged up in the secondary a little bit, so maybe that had something to do with it. But if Kamari House and Christian Harrison are in good shape and Miguel Mitchell, I think those three are going to get the bulk of your safety snaps to, to begin with.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Brian Green's another one who they brought in. He was an All American at Liberty a couple three years ago and he's got a lot of snaps. He's another one, you know, in the defensive backfield. And I think we hear today there's a. I think there's a ruling, I'm sorry, a hearing in his case. He's part of a class of plaintiffs in the state of Louisiana. There's a hearing, I believe, in the Louisiana state court system in Baton Rouge today on that case. What do you think it says, Tom? Do you think it says that they're concerned about their secondary, the fact that they've gone out and they've added a ton of players at this one position really here late in the process, probably
[00:04:22] Speaker B: slightly concerned at safety. I mean, I think Taylor is rolling around there somewhere around their fifth safety.
He's a true freshman and he's made plays. But we all know how hard it is for true freshmen to be, you know, day after day routine guys in your, in your two deep. So I like Taylor a lot I think he's got a great future here, but maybe he needs to be your sixth safety. And I just don't know how that's all going to work out. But I will say this. I'm about tired of Lane Kiffin. I am. I have fed up with what they're doing, basically setting themselves up against the SEC and making the SEC pass a rule, and then. Then they get another restraining order. And I think Thursday is the go day for that hearing as well, with the SEC on the merits of whether they can enforce their own rules. And it just. It infuriates me the what he's done to explain it away. Like, if we're not doing it, someone else is. Well, they've encouraged, from the sound of it, they've encouraged guys to file lawsuits and all. And I just.
Yeah, you're under a lot of pressure. You're getting paid a lot of money. You brought in a huge salaried roster, and you're still doing this. And it just bothers me.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: And there's. I think there's an important distinction to be made there. What. What Kiffin is trying to do is he's trying to bring players who have been playing in NFL preseason games and put them back on the roster. That is different than, I think what we're seeing in most cases where you have players who.
They're trying to get a fifth year of eligibility. Some of them might have gone into an NFL minicamp.
But I do think there's an important distinction to make.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: There certainly there is. But I will say this. I feel bad for the 2022 enrollees who went to training camps and things
[00:06:13] Speaker A: like that, not knowing that this was
[00:06:15] Speaker B: an option, not knowing that. That. That they were going to. And I don't understand why the NCAA did it the way they did and rule those guys out.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: I think it was to protect the incoming freshmen, to make sure that they had spots on the rosters. Like, I was talking to somebody, I don't know two or three weeks about this, and they said, you know, this is not a victimless act to just, you know, just to blanket waiver the class of 20, 22. Because when you do that, then you've got this whole class of incoming freshmen who now do they have spots on these rosters? And so, you know, I do understand it from both sides. I mean, if you're class of 22, you see the class of 20 and the class of 21 in front of you, and they get five years of eligibility because of COVID and then you see classes of 23 and everyone else behind you, and they get five years of eligibility because of this bylaw that was passed this summer. So I certainly understand where they're coming from. And, you know, I think some of them. I think a lot of them are doing this from a standpoint of, you know, a monetary standpoint where they can get paid because a lot of these guys or girls, because this is happening in women's sports too, they are at the highest earning potential potentially. They are potentially at the highest earning potential they are ever going to have in their life. Whatever they go off and they do. You know, we know that whole slogan, 98% will go pro in something other than sports. So whatever they go in pro other than sports, they may not have the same earning potential as they can as the backup linebacker at, you know, good old, you know.
But I also think that there. And people will probably smirk when I say this. I actually think there's a lot of people who look at it as, hey, I get another year of education paid for it.
People who are in sports.
Let's put football off to the side here. People who are in sports where there's not a whole lot of nil money for whatever sport you want to insert here.
It's a way for them to, like, hey, I can go get my graduate degree now and have it paid for. I can go get that first year of law school paid for, whatever the case might be.
So I do think there's some of that going on. And, you know, we focus so much on the bad actors that I do think it takes away from. There are some people who are trying to use this exemption to really improve themselves and, you know, whatever their life looks like after sports, there's no question
[00:08:32] Speaker B: about it, that plays into it. And I don't know who I was listening to the other day on Twitter, put out a video or something about how, hey, it used to be if you played in a snap, you lost a season. I mean, we're talking about years ago. And then they start. Started modifying the red shirt rules to,
[00:08:49] Speaker A: you know, but only for football.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Only for football and football. It got to the point where you could play four, four games and still keep your red shirt. But you go into a baseball game and you throw one pitch, you're done like. Like that season's bird. And so there's. There's been a lot of just uneven application, I think, of not necessarily an uneven application of the rules because the rule books are different from sport to sport, but it has been uneven.
From one sport to the next.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And hopefully after this year, after this class of litigants and what have you that we just have the five for five and we get that settled because there's so much that's unsettled in college sports right now that this ruffles a lot of feathers. And it's including mine with Lane Kiffin. And maybe, maybe they can go forward with the five for five, which was a John Calipari thing from the beginning, and go and make it work the rest of time.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: I don't believe they're going to quit suing. I really don't. I think they're going to continue, people are going to continue to push the envelope until there's, you know, I mean, I guess it's, it's, I guess really what, what they have to have is this, you know, congressional bill that get passed. Maybe not the one that's in, that's, that's in the, the works right now. Maybe it's another one that comes through later on. I don't know how that's going to work, but I think they've got to have some sort of intervention on the, on the, the federal level to, to help them out.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: You saw how disgusted Eli Drinkwitz was earlier in the week or last week. I watched a lot of that press conference he had and he was fuming basically about how you don't know the status of your own roster, certain guys and who you're going to play because of this.
[00:10:32] Speaker A: And it's got to be very frustrating, too, the fact that what's happening is that there was a federal court umbrella that was given to everybody at the end of July. And in the 10th Court of Appeals about a week and a half ago, they stayed that injunction. And so now everybody who was covered, a lot of them are not covered anymore. And I mean, the state courts are getting just absolutely flooded.
And, you know, the, I think maybe you know, what's happening, you know, from, from one state court to another. It's, it's not like the federal court system. It's, it's just, it just feels very scattered what's going on right now. That's enough of that talk, though. Let's, let's talk about Razorback football. They're going to play North Alabama on Saturday at 3:15pm it's going to be on SEC Network. Have you looked at the forecast I heard you saying earlier today, 99, 99 is going to be the temperature. That's the high temperature. And typically you have the high temper here in Fayetteville, right around 3 or 4 o' clock in the afternoon. So 315 kickoff. You're basically kicking it off at the hottest point of the day.
Not going to be a whole lot of shade in the stadium, at least for a little bit, you know, handed X, probably going to be over 100. I have a suspicion, and I haven't gone back and looked up through every box score yet, but this might be the hottest football game they've ever played.
And it's certainly probably the.
I think where I'm going to draw a distinction here is I'm going to look at season openers and see what, you know, the hottest season opening games they played have been. But, I mean, this is going to be up there. Silverfield, he's talked about it throughout the preseason. He wanted to put them out there and practice at 3, 4 o' clock in the afternoon so they could get, you know, acclimated and potentially ready for this. But holy cow, I mean, this is. We saw over the weekend, we saw a lot of games like usc. You know, there was the game where they played San Jose State and people were remarking about how empty the Coliseum looks. That's a huge stadium, number one. And so like, even it's one of those where, you know, you can have 50,000 people in there and it's still going to look empty. But, you know, it looked very empty. But they're going through a heat wave in Southern California. People were talking about it was like sitting on hot plates outside in that sun.
I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of that in Fayetteville, across the country this weekend.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: There's going to be a lot of that. And so you sent me scrambling to a game that I remembered being very hot.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: The opener in 2013, when Brett Bielema wore a jacket. Remember that?
[00:12:57] Speaker B: Didn't remember him. Brett wore a jacket, but it was against Louisiana Lafayette. And we looked it up and I think we just found it was 92 degrees for that. Only 92, but there's 99.
Silverfield called himself a psychopath when he showed the players the like, here's what the highs are going to be the next week, guys. You know, like, he liked it. He wanted them to get used to it. And so this falls right into what he planned for. It's going to be really hot, your hands are going to be sweaty. It's going to be harder to hold on to balls, it's going to be harder to catch the balls and stuff like that. So all these Other things play into it. When it's 99 degrees outside, I think
[00:13:36] Speaker A: you got, you worry too. I think about the player's health. I mean heat related, you know, heat fatigue, like those are things that you really got to watch for in these games. But hey, man, when everything, when you are owned by television, Arkansas is owned by Mickey Mouse right now. I mean, they just are. And it's every SEC team is when you are owned by Disney, they get to tell you, hey, I know it sucks, I know you're gonna be cramping. It's gonna be 100, probably not gonna be a whole lot of people in the stands by the end of the first half.
But we need that 315 inventory on SEC Network. And that's how it is. There have been some times where Arkansas has been able to hear early in the season. I remember in 2000 they played Missouri State down at War Memorial. It was going to be a 6 o' clock kickoff and even at 6 o' clock they determined it was going to be too hot and they bumped it back to an 8 o' clock kickoff. Or you remember three years ago they played Western Carolina down at War Memorial. And that was kind of a weird decision because Pittman didn't want to get home late. So instead of moving it back on a hot day, they said, let's move it forward on a hot day where it'll not like it'll still be really hot, but it won't be as hot as, you know, three o' clock in the afternoon. But those like, like those were where you controlled your own television, you know, like, like SEC Network plus or you know, 2000. I doubt the game was even on TV. There's just not a lot of maneuvering I think you can do with, you know, when you're locked into one of those linear spots like they are for this weekend.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: Yep. And there's not much they can do about it. And they're going to have to deal with it now. It's going to affect attendance.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Oh, no doubt.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: I think the Lafayette game I referenced in 2013 had 60. I recalled it out to you, 62, 69,000.
I don't think they're gonna approach 69,000.
[00:15:22] Speaker C: Well.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: And what gets announced on Saturday will be different than what's actually there. I mean, there's what they announced, there are tickets sold.
There's a different ticket scanned figure that you can get. But that's not, it's not, it's not readily given out on game day. So Arkansas, they've named K.J. jackson, the starting quarterback. By the way, I was so happy that I got through 35 minutes of talking to Ryan Silverfield the other day, and not one time did we bring up the quarterback. I mean, there have been volumes written on KJ and AJ this summer, and I was, I was really happy that we could get through a conversation without talking about that. I thought it was interesting that he said there are multiple positions that they still feel like were open as of last Thursday. And of course, when we get the depth chart, you know, we'll. We'll find who, you know, like, like who's starting where.
But what, what positions do you think were the most competitive when camp closed? Like, like, what were the ones that you were watching the closest?
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Well, I will say this. I am very intrigued by what's going to happen on the defensive front because he made reference specifically to there are veterans on our defensive line who, who might not start Game one. And he made a reference to they might be dinged up a little bit, they might not be 100%, and if they're not, then I don't think they're going to start Game one. He didn't say any names, but the last couple of days we saw that were open, it looked like Hunter Osborne was dealing with something and was slow getting over with his group.
Was he one of those? Is Quincy one of those? Because he referenced a guy who's got a lot of starts and both of those guys do. So who starts at nose tackle, to me is up in the air.
Could be Osborne, could be David Okey. Carlin Jones had a really good camp, so I think you're going to see him play a lot. And then on the, on the secondary, when we were talking earlier, Carter Stoutmeyer was getting some first team reps right about the time we stopped watching practice. He got, he got first team reps maybe the last two practices.
And so what's that rotation going to look like with House, Kamari House, who I think could be one of the biggest impactful newcomers they have, and Christian Harrison, another one, who they said could be the heartbeat of their defense at safety, along with Stoutmire, who the other day said, this is the most plays I've ever made in one camp. They're blitzing from that star position more than Arkansas has recently.
And we're going to see because we saw a lot of blitzing from House and Stoutmire's talking about how he's been blitzing. So that's going to be really fun to watch how Ron Roberts employs defenders this Year and what they do with the Jack position because it looks like Stephen Soules might be ahead of Charlie Collins, but there's going to be games where you're going to need the heavier player out there. And that's why he wanted Charlie Collins to put on weight, get up close to 240, to be able to hold up against teams that really want to pound you, run lead backs, two tight ends and stuff like that.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: Arkansas opened the week as a 40 and a half point favorite over, over North Alabama. And North Alabama won its season opener on Saturday. They beat Sanford 22 to 10. That game was played in Huntsville. What do they call it? Rocket City? Is it Huntsville? Rocket City?
[00:18:38] Speaker B: They do call Huntsville Rocket City.
[00:18:41] Speaker A: They got the big.
What is that like a Warner Von Braun?
[00:18:45] Speaker B: There's a Von Braun center right on
[00:18:46] Speaker A: the side of the highway.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a Rocket Camp.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Science Camp, something like that.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Somewhat of affiliation with NASA, I believe.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: They beat Sanford 22 to 10. I thought it was very interesting that a lot of their stars in that game were the Memphis transfers. You know, like Xavier Johnson had a 95 yard touchdown catch for him. He ended up with 129 yards on, on five catches. They had a defensive end who contributed to a safety.
Defensively, they had a ton of tackles for loss. You know, they brought in Clint Bowen, who used to be the defensive coordinator at Kansas for a while. I think it was an interim head coach at KU as well. He actually went to Oklahoma State last year and was their interim DC after they cleaned house when they fired Mike Gundy. Very similar to Arkansas doing a week or two after.
And, you know, it was, it was a good defensive performance. I don't think Sanford is a very good team. North Alabama and Sanford both had, you know, really poor records last year. But it's very interesting that in this game, Silverfield's first game at Arkansas, he's going to have eight players on his roster and eight players across the way on the North Alabama roster who actually played for him in his last stop at Memphis. It's a real confluence of past meets the present.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: It is really neat. And North Alabama also has another couple of guys from Memphis who went to other schools and transferred in that, that play for them.
You listen to the broadcast much like I did on Saturday night, and to hear their radio guys who know the team.
[00:20:20] Speaker A: He was a clapper. Can I just say, that's the worst thing, if you are a, if you are in a radio play by play booth to be clapping after every play.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Oh, Man, I got tired of hearing the public address announcer. You know, it's third down.
But anyway, you heard how pleased they were with their personnel on the front of their defense and how they really limited Sanford. They might had negative rushing yards, minus eight. So you got an Arkansas team that wants to be able to establish the run. And if you'll think back to the. I'm thinking of the Kent State game, and I think it was the year they played Western Carolina first and then Kent State. They struggled to get their running game going against lesser opponents. Western Carolina really slowed them down. So that's going to be a challenge. They've got this new personnel, heavier guys that the whole gaps well on defense, can Arkansas get a running game going anyway?
[00:21:13] Speaker A: And you heard Silverfield talk about this. The bulk of the players they brought in from Memphis are on the defensive front, and they know what he likes to do up front with his offensive line. So, you know, he talked the other day about, you know, we got to be really, you know, talking about our, our signals, our checks, things like that counts, everything, because they're. They're going to be aware of that. I talked to Brent Dearman last week, who's the North Alabama coach, and he said there was a real emphasis put on line play getting bigger in the off season. He said bigger doesn't always mean better. He said, but typically when you're bigger, you can hold your blocks longer, you can clog up the middle more defensively.
There's just typically a lot more positive to getting bigger. And he was real complimentary of getting some of those linemen in from Memphis in the case of their center, Will French. He came in, he said he was the strongest guy on their team.
And he said. And a lot of that probably had to do with, you know, what he learned at Memphis, right?
[00:22:07] Speaker B: And, you know, I think Ryan Silverfield gets that as well because they really got stouter in the trenches on defense in particular, with the number of 300 pounders they have. I'm thinking back to last year. Campbell might have been 300. Ian Gifford was certainly 300, but they had very few other guys who hit that mark. And when you've got that many guys, you can rotate in, especially on a super hot day. Carlin Jones can play two plays or three plays come out. And David okey, he weighs nearly 300 pounds. Danny Beal is more than 300. So he, he understands the value of being strong in the trenches. They've got to do some more recruiting on the offensive line to get a little bit bigger. There, but he does get it. And that's what Dearman was referencing.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: Isn't it interesting? Because how many times did we hear Sam Pittman really early in his time here talk about the SEC as a big person league, and you got to get big and they really put an emphasis on that, you know, like 21, 22, they really got big. And then you kind of started seeing it go down the last couple of years. I don't know if it was a matter of, you know, they just couldn't afford to buy the, you know, the best players, the biggest player. I don't know what it was, but it's interesting to see that arc in his time where as they got bigger and stronger along the lines, they had a pretty good football team there for a couple of years and. And then it just went away.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: It did. And you know, this is a theory of mine, working theory that, you know, he, he got Derek LeBlanc out of there after one year, D line coach Jermell Ashley, one year before he got Deacon. And I think he was really fond of Deke. I think they were buddies. And I think Deke recruited really well his first few years. But I think by the end between not having the money to, to buy guys and then to really populate that room, the defensive front is where they got behind the curve in the SEC and probably had one of the weakest and thinnest defensive fronts in all of the power four teams last year.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Yeah, their defense was just so bad a year ago. Like, like, I mean, like historically bad defense. Maybe not just historically at Arkansas, maybe in the sec just in terms of just how leaky they were. Even a modest improvement defensively is going to feel like a lot because of, of how poor they were last year. You can read Tom at our website, whole hogsports.com we got a lot there right now. Volleyball opened over the weekend. Soccer got a big win over Little Rock 9 to nothing yesterday. We've got baseball stories, basketball stories, women's basketball put out their schedule today, so a lot. In addition to our football coverage at our website, whole hogsports.com we'll have coverage throughout the week there. Hope to see you next time. Have a great day, everybody.
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