Arkansas News : National Media is High on the Razorbacks

Arkansas is gladly taking all the positive attention it can get following a dramatic road win over a ranked team on a largely otherwise boring Saturday in college football. SB Nation’s Spencer Hall went ahead and ranked the Razorbacks #1 in the nation in his The Top Whatever. The mothership’s stats guru Bill Connelly described the Razorbacks as “chaos addicts” which is fantastic.

Austin Allen was named SEC Offensive Player of the Week and Dan Skipper was named SEC Offensive Linemen of the week for their remarkable efforts. Well done fellas!

The Joe Tessitore Effect was in full, well, effect. The general consensus is “We don’t know how it happened, but here we are,” and people are now paying attention to the Razorbacks. CBS Sports’ recap talks about how the win means the Hogs are trending up, and TCU is moving in the wrong direction.

Fox has taken notice as well, focusing on how this year Bret Bielema’s September struggles haven’t manifested themselves in the record. This TCU game seems to be about more than getting off to a quick start, it’s shaking off those early season struggles and setting themselves up for big things in conference play. It certainly hasn’t been a perfect two games, but it’s two wins and that is something new in the Bret Bielema era.

Perhaps highest on the Hogs right now is ESPN, which put them fourth(!!) in their SEC power rankings. With that being said, they’re still in the Texas Bowl for their bowl projections. There are definitely some early season knee jerk reactions to multiple teams, but national media is starting to buy into the idea that Arkansas could break into that second tier of SEC teams behind Alabama and that’s fun.

Looking into the individual performances, most position groups graded out pretty well against TCU. Again, it wasn’t perfect, but the offensive line showed big improvements and the secondary tightened up when they absolutely had to. Plus Austin Allen made some big time throws in clutch situations. All of that adds up to a pretty big win.

Poor T.J. Hammonds had to wear a misspelled jersey on the sideline this weekend. I don’t know the particulars to putting together a huge amount of equipment necessary for taking a college football team on the road takes, but putting “Akransas” on a jersey isn’t going to help all of those who already abbreviate Arkansas as “AK.”