If you haven't heard yet, the Texas Bowl between Arkansas and TCU on December 31, 2020 has been cancelled. This is due to too many TCU players testing positive for COVID-19. Below is the statement from Sam Pittman concerning the cancellation.
Great words from a great coach. I guess you could say that the winner of this competition was us since we didn't have any players positive with COVID-19? Oh well. At least we made it to a bowl game for the first time since 2016. I would say that the Razorbacks improved so much under just one year. For one, we won 3 conference games which is 3 times more than our total conference wins from the 2017 to 2019 seasons! Let's look at some graphs below:
Chart 1:
Chart 2:
Chart 1 just shows the amount of points that our offense scored for those years versus the amount of points that our defense gave up too. We can see that only the years 2014 and 2015 where we were able to score more points than points given up. But, this chart shows all of that data for non-conference and conference games. Since the 2020 season only had the Razorbacks playing in conference games, we need to adjust this chart to reflect that in order to judge if the Razorbacks improved or not this season.
From Chart 2, we can see that it's a little different. Only 2015 is a season in conference where we scored more than points given up. We see that during the Chad Morris years (2018-2019), the offensive points were very low and the defensive points given up were very high in conference. Under one season with Sam Pittman, the offensive points increased and the defensive points given up decreased. We've shown improvement, but of course we still need to improve a lot. Getting to to 3 conference wins in 1 season compared to just 1 conference win in 3 seasons (2017-2019) is a big improvement for us considering this. There are also a lot of experienced players like T.J. Hammonds and Grant Morgan who announced that they'll return for next season. Believe it or not, we will need to replace Feleipe Franks with a different QB. The best ones that we have are K.J. Jefferson and Malik Hornsby. They are both dual-threat QBs too. Isn't that exciting? It isn't everyday that you hear that Arkansas will most likely have a dual-threat QB as the starter for next year. That is of course if there isn't some other experienced graduate transfer QB like Feleipe Franks that will come to campus for 2021.
All in all, it looks like good things are happening in Fayetteville and you should be excited too. Now let's get to the predictions for this week of football. I've already made my predictions for Bowl Season from my last post but my running total for College Football is 81-23 (77.9%) and for Underdog predictions is 1-8 (11.1%). I'll update that when bowl season is over and do my final prediction for the National Championship when it comes. For NFL, I was 9-7 (56.3%) and my NFL Underdog predictions were 0-0 (none%). My running total for NFL is 74-40 (64.9%) and my NFL Underdog predictions are 0-5 (0%). Now here are my next predictions:
