FAYETTEVILLE -- Arkansas will try to put a loss to No. 17 Ole Miss behind them as they travel to Memphis for a non-conference game on Saturday.
Memphis (3-0) will present various issues for Arkansas (2-1). But one thing is clear Arkansas can't afford to play defense like it did Saturday night particularly in the first half. The Razorbacks scored 28 points in the first half and still trailed. The Hogs gave up 475 yards of offense including 357 through the air. Sam Pittman was asked Monday what the secondary will work on this week at practice?
"Well, the double-move is obviously a concern, and we’re going to get that because it was successful for Ole Miss," Pittman said. "Lining up correct… We’ve got to be better coaching. When you’re checking to check, you can’t make a guy travel. You just can’t, and we did that down there on the goal line. Guys were wide open. We’ve got to do better there. Now, our whole key this week, to me, is, go back a little more to the second half. It’s hard to read alignments, eyes. You watch tape for a reason. It’s about cut splits. It’s about who’s on. Who’s off. It’s about all these things in the secondary. What routes? So if you’re changing late, your mind can’t calculate all the things that you know.
"Here’s a key here. If you’re just lining up before they say. ‘Set-hut’, you’re not getting all that pre-snap stuff that you need. So, we went a little bit, second half, 173 yards is still a lot of yards but it sure as hell wasn’t what it was in the first half. 10 points is a lot different than 31. So if we’ll allow them… Play the play. Make them make a play. A lot of times guys have blitz over here, they’ll check, you’ll check blitz to the other side. Something very simple like that, than trying to change the way we’re trying to cover them. So I think as much problem as it was stopping them personnel wise, it was just as much a problem of us getting in late calls and them not having an opportunity to calculate all the things that they learned through film study and practice."
Pittman was asked if was the schemes by Ole Miss that caused a lot of the issues for his defense?
"They really didn’t do anything," Pittman said. "They had one little route that they ran a crossover route, flooded us out there. But I’m talking about coaching to the players. I mean, we had 12 on the field, we tried to make a substitution when there was nobody coming off the field. Now, we thought because a guy went out of bounds, which is normally the case, you get a little bit more time to sub because he went out of bounds on his sideline. But that wasn’t the case. We’ve got to do a better job over there coaching and we have to do a better job of making sure our kids have time to process. Those two things we didn’t do well, but we did better in the second half, which gives us a little bit of spark going into this week that, ‘Hey, we’ve got good players, let’s line them up and quit trying to win the chess match every time and let our players play.’"
Cornerback Kani Walker was carted off the field and taken to a local hospital during the second half Saturday night. Pittman provided an update on him.
"Kani’s good," Pittman said. "Thanks fo the question. Kani came back with the team. He’s good. I don’t know whether he’ll be able to play or not right now, honestly. He’s been assessed obviously by the doctors. But we’re just happy that he’s healthy and going to be able to recover from all that but we don’t know how fast."
If Walker can't play expect Jaheim Singletary to take his place against Memphis.
"Well, he has to because Kani won’t be out there," Pittman said. "Now if you’re asking past that, (Keshawn) Davila would be the next guy. We believe in him. We just got to make sure he keeps his hands off the defenders. But he can cover. We just got to, I think we’ll probably put gloves on some of those guys this week so they get that grabbing out of them because that really hurt us Saturday, as well."
The Razorbacks will be at Memphis on Saturday for an 11 a.m. kickoff on ABC.
