The Arkansas Razorbacks’ official website has yet to add a countdown to football season to its homepage. What the heck? Don’t they know it’s July? I guess they are too busy dealing with yet another promising member of our basketball team who will not play for us this upcoming season.
Anyway, Rivals has been doing a countdown for the past three weeks of preseason ranking for all 120 Division 1A teams, revealing one team a day until they finish sometime in August. The countdown started with #120, the Mean Green of Texas. Sucks to be you guys. About a week ago Rivals revealed their #50 pick, the Arkansas Razorbacks. The highlights of their analysis was centered around the addition of Ryan Mallet, no surprise there. Anyone who watched the years of Dicks has got to be pumped about the Michigan transfer. Other positive notes were the fact that our very young, but talented, receiving core now has a year of experience playing in the SEC, and for Bobby P. This, combined with a healthy Michael Smith (if that can last), makes for a promising Razorback offense.
Now the lowlights. Rivals has little faith in our defense. Our secondary looks to be vulnerable, as a few of the players slated to start did not preform well last year, and the remaining starters will not have a lot of experience at their positions. That could definitely be a problem, but at least we will have some linebackers this year. Rivals has our linebacker core as the strongest part of our defense. That will be a nice change of pace from last year, as we finished last in run defense in the SEC. Remember the Alabama game? That was awful.
The Rivals countdown is now at #38, here is a breakdown of the SEC teams in their analysis thus far,
#75 Mississippi State, #61 Vanderbilt, #52 Auburn, #50 Arkansas, #43 Kentucky, #40 Tennessee
So, according to their preseason ranking, they have us slated to finish fourth in the West. Behind Ole Miss, Alabama and LSU. Man, I hope Ole Miss falls flat on their face this year. It seems that everyone has jumped on their bandwagon lately, and it’s annoying.
The first football game will be against Missouri State in Little Rock on September 5th. That’s sixty days away.
Trip Jones is a guest contributor for the Fayetteville Flyer. He is a graduate student in the Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. For more of Trip’s contributions, visit his author page.
