NWADG College Football

4 NWA COLLEGE FOOTBALL PREVIEW | 9.20.2020 COLLEGE FOOTBALL P R E V I E W The words from a long-retired coach watching Arkansas football practices the last two seasons haunted me in the offseason. "They just ran plays," he said. "They never fixed anything. They just seemed to be trying to hurry up and run another play." I supplied the clincher to his statement that day: If nothing ever gets fixed, your team is broken. Amen, said the coach, anonymous then and now. "You keep making the same mistakes game after game," he said. "It's exactly how not to coach." That kind of coaching produced back- to-back 2-10 seasons. That's the sign of a "broken" football program. Fast forward to another coach who doesn't mind attribution to his quotes. Jesse Branch was providing the scouting report for Sam Pittman's new defensive line coach, tough-minded Derrick LeBlanc. Branch gave LeBlanc his first college job at Henderson State in 2001. In doing research for that interview, I stumbled upon a story written when Branch was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. Branch played and coached for Frank Broyles, learning core values that set him up for life, in and out of coaching. You fix your mistakes. Repeat them, you are doomed. "That's what we preached – don't beat yourself," Branch said. "We'd say, 'It's not the team with the most talent that wins games but the ones that eliminate mistakes.' I think that's what still wins games." Coaching is teaching. And teaching is correcting the problems. You must make sure they don't happen again. If that means offensive players do pushups when they drop a pass, that's fine. Pittman's practices include that. The other fundamentals are stressed in the same way. There are no shortcuts in football. You teach fundamentals and technique. You go back and fix them if they are wrong. I've heard Barry Odom, the new defensive coordinator, stress technique and the intricacies of how they are taught with his scheme. The bad news this spring is that there were no practices. The good news is that there were countless opportunities in Zoom video sessions to show tape and teach concepts. I was amused when a reporter asked two weeks into the six-week August camp if Pittman had begun to put the Hogs through practices with Georgia in mind. Pittman said no. There will be time for that. It's time to learn Arkansas and get good at what his team will do. The only Georgia thoughts came when the Razorbacks stretched and the Georgia fight song was played through the loud speakers. No one understands the importance of talent more than Pittman. He knows the Hogs need a serious upgrade. But the issue the last two years is that the previous staff did not "coach up" the roster it inherited. And, they were soft. That's the dreaded four-letter word in football. The opposite of soft is tough. You need to be both mentally and physically tough to win at football. It's what LeBlanc learned from Branch at Henderson, philosophies that Branch learned from Broyles and his toughest assistant coach, Wilson Matthews. It's especially important in line play. LeBlanc's lines at Kentucky were traditionally one of the toughest units in the SEC. "You've got to be tough," LeBlanc said. "I really believe that the toughest position to play on the field is the defensive line and to play it well, you better be tough. You better be durable. "When you go on the field, you have to be able to flip the switch and be angry. Our goal in recruiting is to find tough kids who want to grind it out. We are going to earn our pay check every day and that means work. "What I know is that there may be a lot of spread now, but the SEC is still a line-of-scrimmage league. Toughness is the most important factor in playing football. "I learned that from Coach Branch. We inherited a team at Henderson with only 27 returning players. Coach Branch said, 'Don't ever forget you don't have to be as good as the other team, just tougher.' Toughness is going to factor into every game. Tough guys win." As Branch said so well, you don't have to have the best players to win, if you have eliminated mistakes and coached proper technique. Most on the 1964 Arkansas team will tell you that Texas was the more talented team in the Southwest Conference when the Hogs won in Austin to start the run to their national championship. They outplayed the Longhorns in the kicking game, something Broyles always emphasized. Pittman is no different. He hired one of the nation's best special teams coaches, Scott Fountain, and made him assistant head coach. In recent years, the lowest-paid coach on staff at Arkansas was given the title of special teams coach. That says volumes about emphasis. If there is a place where mistakes beat a team the quickest, it is special teams. There have been huge gaffes in special teams that have cost the Hogs points and games in the last few years. Bret Bielema gave scholarships to kickers that didn't work out – until they left. Chad Morris' teams made huge mistakes in special teams, often making national highlight shows. It comes down to details. Fountain explained to me that he's working special teams four players deep in camp. I've never heard of that in the modern days of just 85 scholarships. He's cross training players at multiple spots in case covid-19 quarantines hit. Yes, winning football is crossing your Ts and dotting your Is. It's not about the I-formation, the wishbone, the spread or playing a five-man secondary with a nickel. Concepts and plays are fun and arm-chair quarterbacks recognize good ones. They all work better when mistakes are fixed each day in practice. I don't think the Razorbacks are just going to be "running plays" anymore. IF IT'S BROKE, FIX IT COMMENTARY CLAY HENRY

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