About that secondary

We can't even begin to imagine the pain and disappointment of many of the Hogville crowd during and following the Razorbacks' thorough domination of Troy on Saturday.

Of course, that pain and disappointment leads, in proud people, to making up problems to complain about. And this time, the Hogville crazies are all over the secondary. "They will be destroyed all season," reads the typical sentiment. It may happen, but we just don't see it from yesterday's game.

Part of the problem, we think, is that there were so many "darksiders" "boycotting" the game (but listening on the radio) that few of them saw it in person, and so most had to rely on the dulcet tones of Chuck Barrett to tell them what was going on. We didn't go to the game ourselves, and we weren't exactly thrilled with Chuck's calls. Chuck is, as one wag put it, the exact opposite of Mike Nail. Nail is incompetent but passionate; Barrett is competent but flat as a schoolgirl. It was hard to tell which "side" they were calling for.

As we said, we didn't see it live, but we did watch the Houston Nutt Show and saw most of the plays. The bottom line is that with the exception of 3 drives in the second quarter, Arkansas made Troy eat it.

Troy passed for 214 yards. 151 yards of it came in 3 consecutive drives in the second quarter when the offense left the defense on the field for an extended period of time against that no huddle offense. Arkansas's offense had the ball for 1:52 seconds during that time - Felix Jones's kickoff return and a 3-and-out. Troy was 8-11 passing on those three drives and 9-38 the rest of the game.

9 for freakin' 38.

In the second half, Troy was 6 for 26 for less than 30 yards.

Furthermore, it was not a case of open receivers dropping passes. Leading up to this game, the conventional wisdom was that Troy is good—don't expect Arkansas to roll them. And they got freakin' rolled. Sure, the offense was blah, but Arkansas still put up plenty of yards and points. In fact, this game was far, far better than the game against Utah State last year, and Troy is far, far better than Utah State. While not SEC caliber, Troy is still a bowl-winning team who had won 7 of their last 8 and returned almost their entire squad. They expected to win and were picked by many--especially on Hogville--to win, but now that Arkansas beat the crap out of them, everyone acts as if they were a Division III team.

We guess Hogville leads to amnesia. This was a glorious performance compared to the Utah State game last year, and the Utah State game just happened to be the first of 10 straight wins.