High Horse Sports

The Arkansas Razorbacks season is not over. It’s just beginning.

Let me remind everybody screaming into their phones after a 31-14 nap against North Alabama that panic in Week 1 is a hobby, not an analysis. And before you start planning the funeral, remember what happened last year in Bloomington.

Old Dominion — yes, that Old Dominion — walked into Indiana’s stadium on opening weekend and punched the Hoosiers in the mouth. The Monarchs took a 7-0 lead, and after fifteen minutes of football the scoreboard read 7-7 with Indiana looking like a team that had no business being ranked. Sun Belt team, Big Ten team, dead even. The takes were already being typed.

Indiana then went 16-0, beat Miami 27-21 in Miami Gardens, and won the first national championship in a program history that spans about 140 years of losing and indifference. Along the way they outscored their opponents by 473 points, the second-largest single-season point margin of the entire AP poll era. One quarter of ugly football turned into the greatest season anybody in Indiana has ever seen.

So spare me the Week 1 obituary. The Hogs are 1-0. Ryan Silverfield has been the head coach for exactly one game, and the man was so unimpressed with his own team’s performance that he said so out loud into a microphone. That’s not a red flag. That’s a coach who knows the difference between a win and a product.

Tonight they go to Rice-Eccles at 9:15 to play a Utah team ranked in the top 20 that is favored by almost two touchdowns. Nobody outside the state of Arkansas thinks the Hogs have a prayer. Georgia is next week. The schedule is a meat grinder, the fanbase protested the hire, and the vibes are somewhere between skeptical and openly hostile.

Which is exactly the point. Seasons are not decided in the first quarter, the first game, or the first month. They’re decided by who is still standing in November. Indiana proved that a bad fifteen minutes in August means nothing. Arkansas gets fifteen weeks to prove the same thing.

So here’s the take, and I’m putting my name on it: the Hogs are winning a natty. Not someday. Not in a rebuild. This group, this coach, this run. Go ahead and hang the fucking banner and save everybody the suspense.