The End of an Era and the Beginning of a New One

Razorback football has finally hired a new coach to replace Chad Morris.  His name is Sam Pittman.  He was the Offensive Lineman coach and the Associate Head Coach at Georgia from 2016-2019.  Before that, he had the same position at Arkansas from 2013-2015 under Bret Bielema.  For both times, he had a lot of responsibility involving recruiting at both programs.  He has built the reputation as "one of the best recruiters and Offensive Line coaches in the SEC" as it says on ESPN from Chris Low about Arkansas hiring Sam Pittman.  He rightfully so should be called one of the best recruiters and Offensive Line coaches given is track record.  The total number of players that have been drafted to the NFL that have played or were coached or recruited when Sam Pittman was on the Arkansas staff is 21.  To put that into perspective, there have been 22 Arkansas players drafted into the NFL since the 2014 NFL Draft.  That 1 other was David Williams who was a graduate transfer after Sam Pittman left. 

Out of those 21 players:

• 2 were 7th round draft picks
• 6 were 6th round draft picks
• 6 were 5th round draft picks
• 3 were 4th round draft picks
• 1 was a 3rd round draft pick
• 1 was a 2nd round draft pick
• 1 was a 1st round draft pick.

You can see that Sam Pittman has already impacted basically the entire draft classes for the Razorbacks into the NFL since he came in 2013.  His recruiting has been great for Arkansas when he was here and it has still made an impact when he left.  But of course a coach has to coach up his players just as well as recruiting them to be successful.  His specialty is the offensive line.  The bar graph below shows over the years from 2012 to 2019 of how many sacks the offensive line gives up each season and per game of that season.

Remember that Sam Pittman's time here was from 2013-2015 under Bret Bielema.  Another interesting bar graph to show Sam Pittman's impact over the years is the total amount of offensive yards gained and defensive yards given up by Arkansas per game during the 2012-2019 span.  Remember that Sam Pittman was here from 2013-2015.

 See how much of an impact he had during his time here?  Of course the 2013 season was the first year after a crummy season.  But you see for 2014 and 2015, the offensive yards per game are a lot more than the defensive yards given up.  Once things started to pick up during Sam Pittman's time here, things started to change a lot. The final bar graph that I'll show is probably the most shocking one that really shows the impact that he had with his short time here under Bret Bielema.  This next one shows the total amount of points that we scored per game and the total amount of points that we gave up per game for each season during the 2012-2019 span.  

Notice that the only times where we scored more points per game than points given up per game was in 2014 and 2015 during the best seasons of the Bret Bielema era which is when Sam Pittman was here.  It is crazy to see how much of an impact Sam Pittman had made when he was on the Arkansas staff.  Now he is the new head coach and I think that this is a great hire.  He has already been here before and has a lot of experience recruiting in the SEC.  All of his former players love him and he is great in developing players.  Just look up on Twitter about any former Arkansas players that knew Sam Pittman and they will tell you their love for him.  Check out his first press conference speech that he gave here.

You can just see how great of a coach he is and the kind of character he is.  He even gets emotional about getting the job here!  I even feel like playing for this guy because of his character.  It looks like he will immediately start to get some great players here and hire a great staff.  But of course don't expect his first year to be great.  Arkansas is in a huge hole now and so he needs a lot of work to do.  But he has already hired the offensive lineman coach from Mizzou and a 4-star recruit that originally put his name in the transfer portal after Chad Morris was fired has already taken his name out of it since Sam Pittman is the new coach.  The future looks great with Sam Pittman.  He could bring great change to a suffering program.  Just to remind you of how terrible that this program has gone, here's is a video from my youtube channel MathSportsGuy that shows the worst moments during the Chad Morris Era.

 The official end of the Chad Morris era is now taking place and the beginning of the Sam Pittman era has begun.  Woo pig!