Sam Pittman poised to break the decade-plus cycle for pigs

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – With Saturday’s win over Mississippi State, Sam Pittman is in position to finish with no more than four losses in SEC play if his Hogs can figure out a way to get at least one more win.

It seems like a pretty big deal. If Arkansas can beat Ole Miss, Texas or Missouri, all three of which look beatable on any given day, the Hogs will be 4-4 in the conference and headed to a bowl game with a 7-5 record, provided that Louisiana Tech does not. roll into Fayetteville and make a splash.

However, it used to be no problem at all to finish with just four SEC losses. The Razorbacks’ first season in the league under Jack Crowe and interim coach Joe Kines, which included the infamous loss to The Citdel, may have felt like a disaster, but Arkansas lost only four conference games that year.

From 1998, when Houston Nutt took over, until Bobby Petrino’s final season in 2011, Arkansas almost never fell below .500 in SEC play. Even Danny Ford, who preceded Nutt, finished with a winning conference record half the time, including a 6-2 year in 1995.

Nutt is the standard bearer for SEC success at Arkansas. His Hogs finished without a losing conference record in seven of his 10 seasons, including a 6-2 year in 1998 and 7-1 in 2006. Petrino looked like he could challenge Nutt by finishing .500 or better in SEC play, including back-to-back 6-2 records at the height of SEC West power in 2010 and 2011, until he literally drove the Arkansas program into the ditch and was fired in the process.

However, it’s what’s happened in the thirteen seasons since that makes what Pittman is trying to do seem so important. If his Hogs can pull this off, he will be the first coach since Petrino to have multiple non-losing SEC records.

The only other coach to have one besides Pittman is Bielema, who had his only winning conference record at 5-3 in 2015. A 4-4 finish in 2021 en route to a 9-4 season that had the college football world was infatuated with the Hogs coach as Arkansas rose to No. 8 in the country and ended with Razorbacks fans begging Pittman to get a new contract. This is the latest SEC success.

Of course, with one more win, Pittman will be able to say that last season was the only season of his tenure in which Arkansas did not receive a bowl invitation. However, it’s clear he’s looking for higher honors, and avoiding another losing record to break the streak of coaches without multiple .500 SEC records is currently at the top of the list.

“I’ve never been to a bad bowl game, so we’re going to try to make it to one,” Pittman said. “That’s not the goal. That’s next week’s goal.”

Of course, if that goal is achieved next week, he’ll join another class of coaches he hasn’t seen in more than a decade around Fayetteville. At that point, it’s less about keeping his job and more about building his overall legacy.

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