HOG CALLS

Bielema sees some of Fry at Arkansas

Arkansas coach Bret Bielema talks with reporters during the Southeastern Conference football Media Days in Hoover, Ala., Wednesday, July 17, 2013. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
Arkansas coach Bret Bielema talks with reporters during the Southeastern Conference football Media Days in Hoover, Ala., Wednesday, July 17, 2013. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

FAYETTEVILLE - Regarding rules, Bret Bielema is no Barney Fife.

Anyone watching those Andy Griffith Show episodes, still being rerun 53 years after the show first aired, recalls Andy’s immortally officious deputy hitching his belt and reeling off more rules than a calculator could count starting with “Rule No. 1: Obey all rules!”

Bielema has Barney’s Rule No. 1 in his discipline playbook, too, but the Arkansas Razorbacks’ football coach’s rule book is considerably less voluminous than Barney Fife’s.

The former Wisconsin head coach came to Arkansas last December with a short rule book from his old mentor, college coach and first employer, retired Iowa Coach Hayden Fry.

Bielema lettered as an Iowa nose guard under Fry from 1989-1992 and then coached under him first as a graduate assistant, then linebackers coach from 1994 through Fry’s 1998 postseason retirement and continued coaching Iowa linebackers under Kirk Ferentz through 2001.

“When I played for Hayden Fry and you talked about team rules, we always had a couple but we didn’t have a lot,” Bielema told a gathering Thursday at the Razorbacks’ A-Club. “You have a bunch of team rules, you have a team that needs to be ruled by rules. You would much rather have a team being ruled by their team. I don’t believe in having a lot of team rules.”

Obeying common sense and common decency tends to suffice over too many rules to count prompting most not to account for them.

Ironically, Fry’s mentor was Frank Broyles for whom he played when Broyles was a Baylor assistant coach. Broyles, who hired Fry as offensive backfield coach on Arkansas’ 1961 Southwest Conference championship team, attended Thursday’s gathering as Athletic Director Emeritus.

Broyles coached the Razorbacks from 1958-1976 and was athletic director from 1973-2007. The more he researched Arkansas and then experienced Arkansas, Bielema said, the more he realized who mentored his mentor.

“There have been so many things that I have witnessed since coming here that obviously Coach Fry learned from somebody else with Coach Broyles,” Bielema said. “A lot of those things instilled here at Arkansas, Coach Fry taught to me.”

One thing neither Broyles, nor Fry, had to deal with, but Bielema does, is social media. Twitter, Facebook and the like is a Pandora’s box that coaches not only now must use in recruiting, but must have monitored to ensure their players don’t embarrass themselves or their school.

“I have no rules on Twitter except that I have Derek [Satterfield of the UA sports information department] follow everything,” Bielema said. “If Derek sees something that looks like you are a knucklehead, usually you are a knucklehead, and we’ll ask to take it down. A good rule of thumb is if you have something you tweet that you can read to your mother and she won’t get upset, go ahead and post it. Just think what you are saying is out there for interactive media and the whole world to see, not just the person you are talking to.”

Sports, Pages 16 on 07/22/2013

Upcoming Events