Pigskin Picture: Eastern Illinois

Hey y’all. A quick note before our Sunday recap. If you’re looking for Feel The Rhythm, when I asked Trent this summer if he wanted to keep up with it, he said he’s hanging them up from the blogging game. I was bummed, mostly because the stuff he wrote every weekend was spot on and fun to read, but we can’t all do this forever and you can still find him on Twitter.

I thought for a while on whether or not to keep the name. I eventually opted to change it up, because his were so good and it felt like these needed to be different. So here we are with the Pigskin Picture. I’m not really into Tito’s (or any vodka for that matter) and only sparingly listen to Bob Marley, so we’ll find some new faux sponsors. Sponsors that, like this game, can help us get that awful taste of last year out of our mouths.

When Chad Morris was announced as Arkansas’ 35th head coach, I was skeptical. Skeptical that his best record as a head coach was 7-5, and overall he was 14-22. Yes SMU was a program with less support than several high schools in the DFW area and has been left for dead multiple times. That turn around to 7-5 from where they were was impressive, but would it be good enough here? At an SEC level?

Yesterday’s game against an FCS team (one that went 6-5 in 2017 mind you) isn’t going to make any declarative statements about how his tenure at Arkansas will go. Hell it won’t even tell us that much about the rest of this season. For every good thing, there was something that scared me to death when you replace generic EIU player with one of the seemingly endless line of monsters the SEC throws at you. Instead, all I wanted was to forget how awful of a year 2017 was and give me some reason to be optimistic, and in that Morris and this team succeeded.

Storey looked fantastic in the second quarter! Will he keep that up when he faces a real defense?

Probably not!

But it was fun to see an offense get down the field in chunks, especially with the run game struggling (good lord guys please get that together in the next couple of weeks). For the first time in well over a year, I watched a Razorback football game with enjoyment and not complete dread. Now right now I know that won’t continue the whole season. This is still a team that is going to get smashed by the best of the SEC. Winning two conference games and making a bowl will constitute this year as a success.

So in the long term, does this game tell us anything? Besides confirming that Ty Storey is a better option at QB than Cole Kelley? Not that much. But in the short term, at least for me, we got an enjoyable game with a reasonable football like substance. And after last year, we needed something like that to chase it.