Bret Bielema Woo pig, pay me!

“Buzz” Is Just One Of Many B-Words For Arkansas

The early-1980s Miami Dolphins gave football the Killer Bees: Baumhower, Barnett, Blackwood, Bokamper, Bowser, Betters, and Brudzinski.

The 2015 Arkansas Razorbacks carry just as many B-words, but the college football world is waiting to see if the Hogs kill or are killed. Either way, this team is going to represent one of the more notable stories of the coming season. The Razorbacks are either going to inspire fear and loathing from their foes, or they’ll be laughed off the stage. There isn’t a whole lot of room in between, either. Arkansas is either going to rise or be kept in its (currently lower) place by the SEC West, and the result is going to gain a lot of attention on a national level, not just a regional level. It will inspire drinking — whether borne of celebration or misery (and on which side of the college football fan divide) is the question.

Woo Pig Boozy.

That’s a B-word, but to be honest, it wasn’t one we were focusing on for this team, which will either become barbecued Pork, or roast the competition on its way up the ladder in the world of college Pig-skin.

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The first and most important B-word to associate with Arkansas is Bielema, as in Bret, or — as Midwesterners and many bloggers like to refer to him — “BERT.” Bielema is bold, brash and basically belligerent. He doesn’t pull punches or shy away from a fight. His teams, moreover, play that way as well.

Steve Spurrier — to give one representative example — is a coach who would like to outflank and outsmart you. He’s a supremely fierce competitor, but he has rarely if ever been the kind of guy who relishes heavy-jumbo formations and a pile-driving ground game which owns all the subtlety of a punch in the face. Bielema craves that brand of ball, but he talks with the same lack of nuance off the field as well. This is the identity Arkansas has chosen, all while Nick Saban acknowledges that most of the SEC is playing with more pace and moving toward the style preferred by other relatively new head coaches in the league, Gus Malzahn and Kevin Sumlin.

The fact that Arkansas sets itself apart makes it easier to ascertain if Bielema’s methods work. If the Hogs climb toward the top of the SEC West and win nine games this season, the tempo revolution in the SEC won’t cease to exist, but Arkansas’s retro countermove will impress upon coaches the idea that keeping the ball away from a tempo offense is the best way to stop it, as opposed to anything a defensive coordinator might devise.

Sometimes, head coaches are not seen as the central reasons their teams thrive — see “Chizik, Gene,” and the 2011 version of “Swinney, Dabo,” though it must be said that in the past three seasons, Swinney has swiftly swatted away the notion that the 2011 season was just about Chad Morris. If, however, Arkansas thrives in 2015, the imprint of Bielema will be impossible to ignore. He’s insisting there’s a different way to play these days, the way that remained constant in the SEC before Spurrier arrived at Florida at the beginning of the 1990s. If that insistence leads to gridiron riches, Bielema will show that he wasn’t just the beneficiary of a strong infrastructure at Wisconsin, and of all the work Barry Alvarez did to put him in position to succeed.

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The next B-words for Arkansas are “building, banner and brawny.” The Razorbacks were such a mess after Bobby Petrino’s behavioral bombshell that Bielema wasn’t expected to solve everything in Fayetteville right away. He took his lumps in 2013, and last year, the program took several large steps forward. This program is still building, and so — as much as the Hogs will become a central source of drama in the SEC this season — it has to be said that if this season doesn’t unfold exactly the way Bielema wants, it won’t be a defining and devastating setback. Disappointing and a source of concern heading into 2016? Yes. A final verdict on Bielema’s performance and his ability to succeed in the SEC, not just in the Big Ten? No — it’s still too early in the process to go that far.

Do keep in mind that Arkansas is still building. As much as Bielema might rub many people in the profession the wrong way, he deserves that bit of space in the emotionless world of evaluation.

However, while Arkansas is building, it is in many ways carrying the banner for the SEC and its West Division. This is not necessarily due to anything Arkansas did last season, but to the SEC hype machine and all the noise which accompanied November of 2014.

You remember November of last season, right? Arkansas got punched in the mouth for two months but then spent November hammering Ole Miss and LSU while nearly beating Mississippi State and Missouri on the road. Many a commentator felt Arkansas was far better than a good number of teams in the top 25, ultimately “the toughest 6-6 team in the country” or “the 6-6 team you don’t want to face if you’re in the top 10.”

The reputation of the SEC — even in a down year for the league and the SEC West in particular — carried Arkansas in the realm of public perception, despite a 2-6 record in that very conference. Arkansas was one of a few teams to go 2-6 in its conference but reach a bowl game, a reminder that records are not always what they seem, and that said records often get inflated in college football.

Therefore, as the 2015 season approaches, the Hogs inhabit an uncommon position: They are building, and yet so many pundits have already bought their stock (without a 9- or 10-win season) that a 6-6 or 7-5 season will feel like a failure. Arkansas will in many ways be the measurement of the SEC West, telling us whether parity is the product of a tough division or — as was the case last year — uneven football by a bunch of teams (save Alabama) that couldn’t get out of their own way long enough to rise to a higher level. Arkansas is carrying the banner for the SEC and the West Division this season, in very real ways.

That the Hogs’ style is so brawny and unabashedly bruising will only reinforce everything that’s been said above. If Arkansas goes 9-3, it will be a triumph of manhood in the trenches and the Bielema Way. If the Hogs are stuck at 6-6, they’ll never hear the end of it, whether that’s fair or not. (As noted earlier in this piece, it probably won’t be if the scenario comes to pass.)

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One more B-word has to be brought into the buzz-filled discussion about the Razorbacks: Broyles, as in Frank Broyles, the greatest coach in the history of the program.

College football fans and chroniclers in their 40s or very late 30s might very well identify Broyles as the best college football analyst of all time, or at the very least a part of the best college football broadcast pair on network television. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, Broyles and Keith Jackson lent their rich voices to autumnal Saturdays at the biggest games on the map.

For Broyles, the move to the booth was a welcome source of respite after nearly two decades coaching Arkansas through the greatest period in the program’s history… and also its most crushing disappointment, the loss to Texas in December of 1969, the event known as “ThatDamnGame” (no spaces between words). Broyles was not yet 52 years old when he coached his last game in 1976. He had clearly run the race in the coaching arena, having won a national title in 1964, just before turning 40. Calling games and becoming Arkansas’s athletic director kept him active, but without the intestine-chewing pressure coaches feel when standing in the cauldron of gameday.

Broyles picked a fine successor, Lou Holtz, who — in his first season — won the 1978 Orange Bowl against No. 2 Oklahoma and gave the Hogs one of their finest moments ever. (A graduate assistant on Holtz’s staff in that 1977 season? Pete Carroll.) Yet, Holtz didn’t stick around long enough in Fayetteville to become an iconic coach as a Razorback. Notre Dame called, and Holtz could not resist the chance to make a name for himself in South Bend, which he most certainly did.

Today, Jeff Long is now the athletic director. He is, of course, the person who selected both Bobby Petrino and, more recently, Bielema.

Petrino — with more patience (and a substantially different conception of both morality and ethics) — could have become the next Broyles at Arkansas, ruling the Razorbacks for two decades and bringing them a continuous supply of riches. He was (and is) that talented. However, his ego and appetites got in the way.

Now, Bielema — at age 45 — could become The Next Great Arkansas Coach if he wants to be. Having left Wisconsin, Bielema wanted to challenge himself at a program that has constantly existed in the shadows of other schools — Texas in the Southwest Conference days and now the Alabama-Auburn axis in the SEC. Bielema — if he relishes this sort of fight — could make Arkansas the job that defines his career.

First, though, he has to get Arkansas to the point where the Hogs win 10 or more games a season. Second, he will have to show that he can sustain that kind of performance over the long haul — with a few dips allowed, but only on a very occasional basis.

This season doesn’t mean everything to Bielema and Arkansas, but one can safely say that if we’re here two years from now — in late July of 2017 — and we’re still waiting for a breakthrough, Bielema might be on the hot seat. His behind — another B-word — could get toasty.

Arkansas doesn’t have to put everything together this season at all costs — that’s more the situation Al Golden faces in Miami, and what Steve Sarkisian is staring at in Los Angeles with USC. Nevertheless, if the Bret Bielema era is going to be a success in Fayetteville — possibly on a level commensurate with what Frank Broyles achieved — moving the ball several yards forward in the coming months would be a recommended career move.

Brisket — will Arkansas become it, or turn the SEC West into it? We’ll see what UA and its B-word-bearing program will do in 2015.

About Matt Zemek

Editor, @TrojansWire | CFB writer since 2001 |

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