Advanced Stats Season Preview, Part 1: Where We’ve Been

Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images Things have gotten messy since Sam Pittman left Fayetteville in 2015.Well, we’re back.

Once again, Arkansas is entering a rebuilding season filled with unknowns. Coach Sam Pittman is the fifth Arkansas head coach since Houston Nutt was fired in 2007, and he’ll try to be the first in that period to leave on good terms. As Pittman is nearly 60, leaving on good terms means lifting the program out of the SEC basement it currently finds itself in.

Before we launch a 2020 preview for a season that may not happen, we have to ask: how did we get here? There were off-field issues, like Bobby Petrino’s motorcycle crash that helped define the collapse. There were…