Pittman's Hiring May Have Bolstered Two Programs

Hiring offensive line coaches as head coaches only path to true success in certain parts of the country

Author:
Kent Smith
Publish date:
Sep 12, 2022 2:13 AM EDT

In this story:

In December of 2019, Arkansas Razorback athletics director Hunter Yurachek bucked all the trends and hired an offensive line coach in Sam Pittman to be the university's newest football coach.

A week later, Appalachian State, having recently lost Arkansas native and former Mountaineers head coach Eli Drinkwitz to Missouri, decided if an offensive line coach is good enough for the SEC, then it's good enough for the Sun Belt, and hired Shawn Clark.

Now, for the second straight year, Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher, armed with a giant contract, piles of NIL money and highly ranked recruiting classes, didn't have what it takes to out-coach an old offensive line coach with none of those things.

With the success of Pittman and the showing by Clark over the past two weeks with what should have been a win over North Carolina and coupled with an upset of the Aggies in College Station, hiring an offensive line coach as head coach almost seems like conventional wisdom.

Just look at how both teams won this past weekend. It was old school SEC football.

Dominate the line of scrimmage on both sides and punch them in the mouth. It's a style of play that was more difficult to win with 20 years ago, but in an age where players brag about wearing pads three days in a single week with the pride of making it through a month of grueling, full contact three-a-days, a playing style that requires both physical and mental resilience is the perfect recipe for dominating modern teams.

When it comes to understanding how to assert a team's will, no one has a better understanding than a line coach. The trenches are where making a team quit, or at least wish it had, begins.

If there's a coach on each team capable of teaching players how to be tough in mind, body and spirit, it's a line coach from either side of the ball.

It's why Pittman is the perfect fit in Arkansas.

It's why Clark is the perfect man for App St.

Both places will struggle to compete by being flashy. Such play wouldn't reflect the DNA of their fanbases either.

The people of Arkansas are tougher than they realize. The things they put themselves through, the situations they have to battle back from, are things that blow people's minds elsewhere.

What's normal in the woods of South Arkansas, the delta of East Arkansas and in the mountains of Northwest Arkansas is astounding to the outside world. After watching the fans in Boone at the App St. game against North Carolina, it appears they too are cut from a similar cloth.

Neither team can hope to simply pound their opponents into submission every game, but weakening another team with body blows throughout the course of the game sets up knockout blows when the time is right. If you don't know what that's like, go back and watch KJ Jefferson's fourth quarter touchdown pass to Warren Thompson against South Carolina.

For the first time ever, Arkansas truly feels like it has the mentality necessary be an SEC champion. As for App St., if the SEC were choosing a team from North Carolina based upon the football team's ability to be a cultural and qualitative fit alone, the Mountaineers would be the easy choice.

Two programs able to stare down teams with unmatched resources, big name coaches and endless mountains of NIL cash, that's what has been built in both Fayetteville and Boone.

Arkansas and App State are where they are because their administrations had the guts to go against what every other program in the country said was the right way to choose a coach and took a risk on two coaches who had spent years buried in the trenches.

It's a choice their players and fans can appreciate, and one teams like Texas A&M have learned to wish had never been made.