Arkansas football is bringing a pillow to a gunfight

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The problems with Arkansas football are too numerous to mention. One way of expressing the depth of misery in Fayetteville right now is that the head coach is an offensive tactician who doesn't have elite offensive players. That's a problem. Ryan Silverfield is an offense-first head coach. When any school hires a head coach with expertise on offense, the first point of focus should be on whether the coach is able to guide a quarterback with elite talent. That has to be priority number one. The offensive guru needs a QB who can make plays. 

Imagine Ryan Silverfield with Trinidad Chambliss. Arkansas would still have roster holes elsewhere, but the Hogs would have a major-league threat on offense. As it stands, they are impotent. They are helpless in the face of a good defense such as Georgia's. This is yet another failure of Hunter Yurachek. He hired a coach without being able to give him a top-of-the-line quarterback to inherit. Yurachek threw Silverfield into the deep end of the pond and was not willing to pay top dollar for a premium QB. He gave Silverfield a dollar-store budget but asked him to create world-famous art. The material just isn't there.

It feels like a big waste of everyone's time to hire a head coach with an offense-first background and then not give him a Cadillac QB to work with in Year 1. What are we doing here? What's the point of hiring an X-and-O guy if he doesn't have a stud at football's most important position? It's infuriating the more you think about it. 

Arkansas' defense did not embarrass itself against Georgia. The defense got worn down as much as anything else. When the offense offers so little help in terms of ball control as well as scoring, the defense was just not going to be able to hang in the ring for 15 rounds without taking some heavy punches from the Dawgs and their physically imposing bodies. The offense's inability to do much of anything for three quarters made a Georgia rout inevitable. There is just so little potency on this offense, so little sense that any player is a threat to score or bust off a long run. The passing game operates mostly in a phone booth. Nearly every pass is under 10 yards past the line of scrimmage. Offense looks extremely hard for this group. Fifteen 5-yard passes often looks like the most logical way for this offense to move the ball, but that is not sustainable.

Until Arkansas' offense can inspire a sense of hope and can create fear in the mind of an opposing defensive coordinator, nothing else about this season will get off the ground.

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