![]() I thought for sure Coach Caldwell was going to come over and talk to me about why I should be at Penn State.įranklin, like his Outback Bowl coaching adversary, ended up at a smaller school, East Stroudsburg, where he enjoyed a record-setting career at the Division II level. It had a little target sitting in the end zone. “I think Jim Caldwell was the quarterbacks coach at the time,” Franklin recalled. The eighth-year Penn State coach has occasionally told the self-deprecating tale of how he attended a PSU football camp back when he was a young quarterback growing up in the Philadelphia area. In some ways, his story is similar to Franklin’s. You would expect the Razorbacks to be solid up front, given that Pittman served as an offensive line coach at 14 of his previous coaching stops. Freshman Raheim Sanders and sophomore Dominique Johnson have 499 and 498 yards, respectively, and Johnson has scored a team-best seven rushing touchdowns. Senior running back Trelon Smith has gained 592 yards, while Jefferson has produced 554 on the ground. All four of Arkansas’ top ball carriers are within 100 yards of each other. Jefferson will be without his favorite target in the Outback Bowl junior wideout Treylon Burks has opted to sit out after catching 66 passes for 1,104 yards and 11 touchdowns during the regular season.īut the Razorbacks have other ways of moving the ball, the most notable being a multifaceted ground game that ranked third in the SEC this season with an average of 217.3 yards per game. The key to their success this season has been redshirt sophomore quarterback KJ Jefferson, who has completed 66.9 percent of his passing attempts for 2,578 yards, with 21 touchdowns and only three interceptions. They were competitive with Alabama in Tuscaloosa, falling 42-35. Even their lone loss during that late-season surge was impressive. 7 Texas A&M, then rebounded from a three-game midseason losing streak with victories in four of their last five. They won their first four, including upsets of No. This season, the Razorbacks’ upward trajectory has continued. Arkansas even received an invitation to the Texas Bowl, but the game was later canceled. While the Razorbacks won only three games in the COVID-shortened 2020 season, the first of those victories was a 21-14 victory over 16th-ranked Mississippi State, an upset that broke a 20-game SEC losing streak. That December, the school turned to Pittman, giving his first head coaching job at a four-year school. In 2019, Arkansas suffered a series of embarrassing defeats in Chad Morris’s second season as head coach, including a dismal 45-19 home loss to Western Kentucky. With an annual salary of $900,000, he was among the highest-paid assistant coaches in the country. Pittman might not have been making Jack Nicholson money when he was with the Bulldogs, but he was doing OK. He was the offensive line coach at Arkansas from 2013-15 before moving on to Georgia. He’s had stops at Cincinnati, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, North Carolina and Tennessee. just trying to get in the stadium, feel the atmosphere.”Īfter an NAIA All-America career as a defensive end at Pittsburg State, Pittman went into coaching in 1987 at a Missouri high school and has been moving up the ranks ever since. “I was one of those people trying to get into the game, trying to get a glimpse of the coach on the bus, the players on the bus. “When we’re coming in on the bus to the home games, you see people walking there,” he said. Now that he’s in charge, it doesn’t take much to bring those memories flooding back. He even attended one of the school’s football camps back when Lou Holtz was head coach. Pittman grew up in Grove, Okla., about 70 miles from Fayetteville, Ark., and was a big Razorbacks fan as a kid. The Oklahoma native, now in his fourth decade in coaching, has taken a program that suffered back-to-back 2-10 seasons prior to his arrival and turned it into the kind of team that can hold its own against the likes of Alabama, Texas A&M and LSU and will now get its shot at Penn State. Still, there is a compelling story arc to Pittman’s two-year tenure as head coach of the Razorbacks.
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