Before all of this AD drama, Sam Pittman had already landed in one of those make-or-break weeks that define a season. The Hogs, fresh off a 41-35 loss to Ole Miss, a game that turned into a scoreboard chase and left plenty of questions swirling about where the Arkansas Razorbacks’ running game is headed. The offense hummed for much of the night, racking up 526 total yards, but the outcome only sharpened the glare on Pittman with Memphis looming in Week 4. Their own athletic director made headlines for less-than-sunny comments about expectations.

That’s where the outside voices came rushing in. Cousin Shane from That SEC Podcast didn’t sugarcoat the predicament. “Arkansas needs this one, Mike. I mean, they need this one, especially with the AD out here saying they’re going to be competitive. We don’t want you to be competitive with Memphis. We want you to destroy Memphis,” he said. He reminded listeners that Memphis isn’t the soft spot some fans might assume. “They could absolutely give Arkansas fit. Hell, they could potentially win this game. And you want to talk about detrimental to a program, brother. They will burn that damn place down… They ain’t going to get Sam till the end of the week, man. They going to send his a– packing.” The urgency was laid bare—Arkansas simply cannot afford a stumble in this matchup.

Even so, Shane wasn’t leaning toward doom and gloom. After wrestling with the prediction, he gave Pittman the nod to find a way. “I feel like this team knows it. And that’s why I do not feel like they treat this game as a trap. This is a game that Arkansas gets back on track,” he said. He circled back to the Ole Miss game, framing it less as a sign of collapse and more as a blown opportunity. “You can say what you want… it felt like Arkansas lost that game last week. And I’m not sh—–g on Ole Miss. I feel like Ole Miss is a good football team, but they are young and inexperienced… Arkansas needs to be dangerous now because their backs against the wall.” His final call was a one-possession nail-biter, Razorbacks 35, Tigers 31.

Truth is, Sam Pittman didn’t walk away from the OM tape wringing his hands over everything. He saw plenty he liked, especially in how the offense moved the ball. But he was blunt about one flaw. “I think right now, to be perfectly honest, the only disappointment Saturday was our first down run efficiency, especially in the third quarter,” Pittman said. Strip away one Taylen Green 11-yard carry, and the Hogs were left slogging at three yards per rush in that frame. Throw in an incompletion, and first downs became a handbrake instead of a launchpad.

Still, Pittman isn’t treating the run game as broken, just unfinished. Memphis, sitting undefeated at 3-0, will complicate the fix. The Tigers throw out a 3-3-5 defense that never looks the same two weeks in a row. “Very confusing defensively,” Pittman admitted. “We have to continue to watch more and more film on them because they play a little bit different each and every week.” Offensively, Memphis is no slouch either, living off a zone-read attack Sam Pittman described as “about as good as anybody.”

As for Hunter Yurachek’s public musings that Arkansas isn’t chasing national championships, Pittman brushed them aside. His plate is full enough with trying to quiet the noise the old-fashioned way, by winning.

Hunter Yurachek isn’t optimistic about Sam

When Arkansas AD Yurachek stepped to the mic at the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Sept. 15, he didn’t hold back. He told fans point-blank that the Razorbacks are “not set up to win a national championship.” That alone was enough to rattle the fan base, but he kept going. Talking about the future of NIL, Yurachek said Arkansas may need to explore a so-called “third lane.”

He admitted, “Until we get our (NIL) enforcement agency up and running, you’re going to continue to have schools operating in that third lane, and that’s a bad place to be in my opinion. It’s bad for college athletics. I don’t want to operate there, but to be competitive, we may have to figure out what that third lane looks like for the University of Arkansas.”

Fans didn’t exactly rally behind him either—social media lit up with complaints that he should’ve embraced that “third lane” long ago. Neither is the coach; his focus is on Week 4. “I’ll be honest with you, we’ve got to beat Memphis, so I really haven’t thought a whole lot about it to be honest with you,” Pittman said about what he thinks about the boss’s comments.