Petrino Forged Toughness Needed to Make Hogs Top 5 Program with Literal Line in Sand

Former star wanted to quit as trio of legendary Razorbacks glad portal didn't exist in 2008

Arkansas Razorbacks tight end DJ Williams breaks free during the Sugar Bowl against Ohio State. / Arkansas Communications

LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas tight end DJ Williams couldn't see straight.

He was covered in sand, his legs were exhausted, and as he laid there in the pit with his sled buried, he barely had enough left in the tank to even hold a thought. This new coach, Bobby Petrino, had done something Williams never thought he would do — make him quit.

The questions blinked in and out of his head. Why wasn't his assigned partner in this sand pit with him?

What was he even up to while Williams literally felt like he was dying? What was departed Arkansas Houston Nutt doing over at Ole Miss and what all is involved with transferring to another school in the SEC?

Meanwhile, coaches on either side continued to yell at him. The pain and his wandering mind made it easy to block them out.

"I'm fixin' to hop out this sand pit and go straight to Oxford," Williams said, describing his thoughts on his 4th and 5 podcast last week.

He had finished a Full Metal Friday, a workout fully intended to blow up players' legs to the point of full exhaustion before this psychopath of a coach forced half the team into the pit while their partners were sent elsewhere out of sight. There was no way Williams was going to move on his own another inch without detaching from the sled that had become immovable.

Then, unexpectedly, a force began to lift his body from the sand. Kareem Crowell, a sophomore defensive lineman from Hargrave Military Academy, hoisted Williams up, bearing the weight of the tight end's body while working to maneuver an arm across his broad shoulders.

That's when a second defensive player jumped to his side. This time, Jerry Franklin, a future NFL linebacker and fellow Arkansan, took on part of the load of carrying Williams' body as the pair dragged him through the pit across the finish line.

"I lay down and I am exhausted," Williams said. "You know Coach [Jason] Veltcamp, he comes up to me and he says 'Go get Lucas!' Lucas Miller was my partner. 'Go get Lucas!' I'm over her thinking what the H*** was Lucas doing this whole time? I'm over here dying."

Unbeknownst to any of the players in the pit, Miller was facing his own torture that was tied directly to the actions of his unseen partner. While Williams was in the sand contemplating giving up on his dream, Miller was forced to do non-stop bear crawls that would not end until Williams made his way through the door and rescued him.

"I swear to God, when I saw Lucas right there, this is what Coach Petrino does that made him so effective," Williams said. "He made you understand that if you quit, you're not just affecting yourself, you're affecting your teammates. From that point on, it was a different DJ."

Ever since, Williams says he can't quit at anything he does because of what happened that day. Former Razorbacks receiver Jarius Wright, who also found himself in the pit, said nothing he did during his NFL career compared to what he went through under Petrino while turning the Hogs into a Top 5 program.

"It was some of the hardest stuff I ever done in my life, DJ," Wright said. "I seriously used to pray at night about it."

Both Williams and former Arkansas receiver Joe Adams agreed the time at Arkansas was physically and mentally tougher than what they faced in the NFL. However, there was another Petrino, Bobby's brother Paul, whom Williams isn't sure he could have survived and openly wondered how Wright and Adams held up to the constant yelling and demand of perfection.

"I know how we did it," Adams said. "That was really one of the reasons me and Jay came. The same passion he was giving us, we was giving back. It wasn't like we didn't want it. We wanted it just as bad as he did. We was going to do whatever it took to get on the field and produce. It didn't matter how he went about it. He wasn't going to run us off."

Eventually, Wright said, the receivers learned to channel the in your face screaming into positive energy. It gave them a mental toughness and an edge that played out on the field before finally becoming a source of inspiration.

"His energy, all the yelling, the chasing us downfield after we caught the ball, his energy just kinda ran through us throughout," Wright said. "He jumped on a fumble in the middle of practice in the middle of a live drill. I think his energy ran through Joe and I, just the way we played. You could see Joe barking at people after every play. I'm chasing people down trying to block them. We played hard every snap and we didn't give DBs off."

All three admit that had the transfer portal existed, there were several players on the team who would have left that first year as the Petrino brothers and the rest of the staff tried to carve the men and the mentality it would take to be a dominant force in the SEC. So many fond memories held by Razorbacks fans might have ended right there in that sand pit alongside a fallen Williams.

"It was the culture that was in that building," Williams said. "It had to get real uncomfortable. People had to get pushed to the limit to build it, but we stuck around and we loved it."

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