FAYETTEVILLE -- Arkansas lost another game they should have won on Saturday when they fell to Memphis 32-31 after blowing a 28-10 lead.

The ending was all too familiar to Arkansas fans as running back Mike Washington fumbled the ball away on a second-and-2 play at the Memphis 7 with 1:18 remaining in the game. It was Arkansas' third turnover of the game compared to two for Memphis. Just like last season with one exception the Razorbacks lost the turnover battle and thus the game. Just last week a similar play happened on the final drive at Ole Miss when wide receiver Jalen Brown fumbled the ball. Sam Pittman has seen this for two seasons now, but can't seem to fix the issue.

"Well, we knew we had three timeouts," Pittman said. "So, we were in a 'church' situation. So, at the two-minute mark, we wanted to get a first down because we wanted to get him out of his timeouts, but we weren't going to score. And so at that particular time in the game, now we may have changed to do that later on once he got out of his timeouts, but at that point, when we fumbled, I think he'd only used one of his and we were trying to get a first down. Then, we were going to decide whether he was who was going to let us score or whether we were just going to kneel it out and kick the field goal. But we still needed another first down to get him out of his timeouts. And as you've seen, he went 95 on us in no time before. So, we were trying to take all the clock we possibly could. Unfortunately, we fumbled and at that point, game was over."

A reporter asked Pittman about losing the turnover battle 3-1?

"I think it was 3 to 2," Pittman said. "I think Miguel (Mitchell) had one (interception) and Julian (Neal) had one. They certainly played a factor. Obviously, the last one played a major factor. They all do. Mike feels terrible and, you know, I hate it for him because he's been such a great player for us. He still is. He just happened to; they jarred the ball loose from him. But, yeah, I mean, we lost turnover battle by one last week and lost by six and lost it by one (this week). So, it has some major relevance in the game. Obviously, the last two were the last two fumbles at the– about the same time in the game two weeks in a row."

Pittman was asked his reaction when he saw the football on the ground?

"I saw it on the ground so I was hoping that some part of his knee was down," Pittman said. "But I saw it on the ground. I mean they made a good call on that. We fumbled the ball, but I saw it out on the ground."

Pittman said the coaches stressed ball security coming out of the two-minute timeout.

“Oh yeah we stressed that," Pittman said. "We stressed that we didn’t want to score. We had to get another first down, we didn’t have to, but do you wanna leave 50 seconds on the clock for them? I don’t. At some point, we had to figure out whether we were going to kick a field goal or whether we were going to score on them. At some point I thought [Ryan Silverfield] might let us score to get the ball back, but he had used his timeouts. By that point we were in easy field goal range to win the game.”

Arkansas dropped to 2-2 on the season with the loss. Pittman talked about his message to the locker room after another disappointing loss.

"We got a lot of work to do," Pittman said. "We tried to fix some things defensively. We were trying to fix some things from a week ago and I don’t know how much we got fixed to be perfectly honest with you, with a 500-yard day on us. We got to get to work offensively. We were in field goal range on the second-to-last drive and we got sacked. It took us out. We were going to go up eight, assuming he makes the field goal. So we wasted some points there, where instead of them scoring and going for two and not making it’s them not making it and losing.  The bottom line, you can name thousands of scenarios on there. We can’t let a team go 95 to take the lead on us. We just can’t, and they went by pretty easy. So we have to do a better job there."

Memphis went 94 yards in four plays to take the final lead over Arkansas with 4:51 remaining in the game. Sutton Smith raced for a 64-yard touchdown to take the lead. All the issues though weren't just the fumble and defense. The Razorbacks only scored three points in the second half one week after just putting seven up against Ole Miss. In both games they scored 28 in the first half.

"I think the biggest thing is we weren’t running the ball in the second half," Pittman said. "And on first down we were trying to run the ball and we were making negative yardage, and I think that was maybe the biggest thing. In the second half, we made a conscious effort, because we were running it pretty good in the first half, that we were going to try and run, and play action a little bit more in the second half. It’s hard to play action when the run’s not doing very good. So we just started behind the chains to be honest with you."

Defensive tackle Cameron Ball was asked how devastating this loss was for the team?

"Oh, very," Ball said. "This is not what we expected. Been going to this game with the mindset of us of this [not] being the outcome. It's kind of bad right now, man."

Taylen Green agreed with him.

"Definitely like Cam said, it’s very frustrating. We had opportunities to win. We just didn't get it done."

Arkansas and Notre Dame will kickoff at 11 a.m. on Saturday from Razorback Stadium and televised on ABC.