The next time Arkansas hires a coach, watch the money

NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos...

Ryan Silverfield isn't on the hot seat at Arkansas. He will get a second season to coach this team in 2027, even if the Razorbacks do finish 1-11 this year, which is a distinct possibility going into a crucial home game versus Tulsa this coming Saturday. If Arkansas does fire Hunter Yurachek (which it should), the new athletic director will come into the job knowing s/he needs to support Silverfield in ways Yurachek hasn't done and isn't doing. Silverfield will get at least one season under the new athletic director if that change is made at any point before the 2027 college football season. Silverfield will be UA's coach in 2027. Fans might not be happy with him or his job performance, but most can certainly see this problem goes much higher than him. This is a situation he inherited, not one he created. 

While we wait and hope for a Hunter Yurachek firing, we all need to realize how different things are in the NIL and transfer portal world. We used to live in a college football universe in which the coach's opening press conference and his SEC media days press conference would be treated with a sense of urgency from local and national media, as though the way a coach talked was a real indicator of how he went about his business and how he created a specific culture and identity within a program. In older times, that view contained some meaning, but today, that focus is outmoded and no longer very useful. 

What matters now in college football is not "talking season," but money. Specifically, we are referring to the bottom-line investments a program is willing to make in roster construction and talent acquisition. Arkansas, as we have noted, lags well below the SEC average in dollar expenditures for acquisition of players. Arkansas is doing things on the cheap, and that's simply inexcusable for an SEC program in a state with large corporate entities in position to provide ample material support.

The new world of college football is such that a coach, upon being hired, should be measured not by what he says or what kind of culture he intends to create, but by the level of investment in his program. 

Ryan Silverfield went through the dog and pony show of saying all the right things (and he did – he didn't make any big gaffes or flubs, he actually handled those front-facing media responsibilities with class and decency), but we can all see how little that actually mattered. What mattered, and will always matter in this new landscape, is the investment made in the program. 

If the money is there, talk becomes less cheap. If the money isn't there, no words in the world are going to compensate for that deficiency. Hopefully we all learned this in the case of Ryan Silverfield.

More at NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos