Arkansas line coach talks media guide cover and turning down Alabama
The Arkansas Razorbacks are letting their 2015 media guide tell you all you need to know about how the Hogs plan to rise up among the West elites. By putting their offensive line front and center, they are letting not only the five guys up front but prospects all around the country that if you play in Fayetteville, you will be the focal point of a contending team.
Arkansas offensive line coach Sam Pittman echoed those statements recently as he was a radio guest on Sports Talk with Bo Mattingly.
“We use it and a lot of other things in terms of what we’re able to do. Our guys fly first class," Pittman said. "I explain it like our O-linemen are treated like most teams' quarterbacks, and that’s how it is. … We want to be known in the best in the nation, and that’s what we’re striving to do. If people think we’re not, we try to prove we are."
“It’s kind of cool. It comes along with what Coach B did at Wisconsin and the offensive line coaches he had there. It’s a neat deal, and I think it’s catching on more around the nation with these kids.”
Pittman was also asked about overtures by Nick Saban and Alabama to coach the offensive line in Tuscaloosa.
“Any time somebody shows interest in you, you look at it and say, ‘Is it better than what I have?’” Pittman said. “At the time, I said Arkansas was my dream job. I had told (recruits), ‘Thank you for committing to us at Tennessee (Where Pittman coached before Butch Jones was hired in Knoxville). We’re going to Arkansas, and they say yes.’ I couldn’t imagine picking up the telephone and calling (parents) and saying, ‘I appreciate your sons decommitting from Tennessee to come to Arkansas, but I’m going to another school.’ I just don’t think that’s right."
“Too many times in our profession, it happens immediately after signing day. I just don’t know how that can be right. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell my mother that. We’d finally moved back close to home. And I couldn’t tell Coach Bielema that. In a nutshell, I’d made a commitment, and then the university made me a commitment to me. I was flattered, but obviously, I had told Arkansas I was going to be their coach, and that’s what I did.”
Sounds like Pittman is an old school coach that believes his word still means something. How could you not want to play for a coach like that if you are an elite offensive line prospect?
(h/t Sports Talk with Bo Mattingly)
