FAYETTEVILLE -- Arkansas seemingly lacked effort and suffered an embarrassing 56-13 loss to Notre Dame on Saturday in Razorback Stadium with 75,111 fans in attendance.
Arkansas settled for 39-yard field goal by Scott Starzyk on its first possession for a 3-0 lead, but it was all down hill from that point on. Notre Dame drove 75 yards on its first possession and took a 7-3 lead on Jeremiyah Love's 1-yard run and then the route was on. Sam Pittman thought the team had a good week of practice.
"Congratulations to Notre Dame," Pittman said. "They've got a really good team, good physical football team, and they came in here and whipped us. Obviously, we have a better team than what we showed today, and so we certainly have to go to work on figuring out why we played this way."
Notre Dame led 42-13 at halftime. Nothing was more evident of Arkansas' struggles on the day than the final minute of the first half. Love scored on a 3-yard run to give Notre Dame a 35-13 lead with 35 seconds remaining. It completed a 12-play, 75-yard drive.
Arkansas got the ball back and on the first play Taylen Green hit Raylen Sharpe for a 20-yard gain only for the wide receiver to fumble the football at the Hogs 45. DeVonta Smith recovered for Notre Dame. On first down Jordan Faison caught a 10-yard pass from C.J. Carr. On second down, Carr hit Jadarian Price for a 35-yard touchdown as he ran past one Arkansas defender after another.
So Arkansas went from only down 28-13 to behind 42-13 in the final minute before intermission. Notre Dame scored a touchdown in each of the third and fourth quarters to finish off the pathetic showing. Pittman didn't rule out some personnel changes during the bye week.
"I don't know," Pittman said. "Let me see. The game got over, what, 20 minutes ago? Listen, we owe it to everybody to put the best product out there and so there's a lot of things that come in play with that."
Pittman was asked about the fans wanting him fired?
"I understand," Pittman said. "I get it. If I was a fan, I'd be mad at me too. I'd be frustrated as hell with me. But here's what I'll say. As long as I'm the head coach at Arkansas, I'm going to fight my butt off to get the guys out there. How long that is, it is partly up to me because of what we put on the field, but that's not my call. And if I'm worried about that all the time, I won't be able to do as good a job as I possibly can. But I will say this, if I was the fans, I'd be mad at me too. Hell, I'm mad at me to be perfectly honest."
Notre Dame scored on each possession of the first half. The Hogs did pull to within 14-10 when Shaq McRoy, a 6-foot-8, 344-pound offensive tackle, lined up at fullback on a third-and-goal play and powered in from the 1-yard line. With 11:19 remaining in the first half it appeared at that point the Razorbacks might be settling in. But the defense still couldn't stop anything Notre Dame was doing and the Arkansas offense probably had its worst showing of the season.
After Notre Dame went up 28-10, Starzyk added a 49-yard field to pull the Razorbacks to within 28-13 before the disaster in the final minute of the first half.
Notre Dame finished with 641 yards of total offense on the day including 431 through the air. Carr was 22 of 30 passing for 354 yards and four touchdowns. Price and Love had big days out of the running back spot. Price carried 13 times for 86 yards and a touchdown. He also caught a pass for a 35-yard touchdown. Love rushed 14 times for 57 yards and two touchdowns. He also pulled in five passes for 70 yards and two more touchdowns. Jordan Faison caught seven passes for 89 yards.
For the third game in a row the offense didn't respond in the second half. After scoring seven points in second half at Ole Miss they were limited to three against Memphis, But in both of those games they scored 28 in the first half. They were shutout the final 30 minutes on Saturday.
"You know, I think they were a little bit better in the secondary than possibly we might have thought," Pittman said. "Really, I felt like we, you know, early in the whole first half, I felt like we protected him pretty well and we ran the ball real well. But, you know, we have put ourselves in a little bit of some third… That was one of our goals, to stay out of third-and-long, you know. And we had put ourselves into some of those situations this year and converted them, and really, we just didn't today, but he didn't run the ball as much. When he did, it went for a while. I think they had a little bit better, tighter coverage than maybe what we anticipated, and that means us getting off of that coverage as well."
Green completed 17 of 32 passes for 207 yards and one interception on Saturday. He did lead the team in rushing with 10 carries for 81 yards. Arkansas finished with 365 yards of total offense including 207 through the air. Mike Washington rushed 15 times for 63 yards. O'Mega Blake once again topped the team with six catches for 73 yards. Sharpe added five catches for 42 yards.
Miguel Mitchell had 12 tackles to lead all defenders in the game. Julian Neal added eight tackles, five solo, and a pass breakup that he just narrowly missed intercepting. Edge Phillip Lee had six tackles, four solo, a sack and 2.5 tackles for loss.
Wide receiver Jalen Brown was carted from the field and broke both bones in his leg.
"He broke his fibula, I believe," Pittman said. "Is it fibula, tibula or both? Yeah. He seemed to be doing okay in that situation, but he broke both of those bones."
Arkansas (2-3, 0-1) will now enter the bye week while Notre Dame (2-2) evened their record.Â
