FAYETTEVILLE -- The 2014 Arkansas Razorbacks football media guide lists 6-1 junior defensive tackle DeMarcus Hodge weighing 330 pounds.
That's encouraging. Hodge's spring practice weight was listed at 343. His Razorbacks letters the past two years mainly were earned for throwing his weight around in goal-line and short-yardage situations.
Even after trimming 13 pounds, it's likely that Hodge will still need to be lighter, quicker and show more endurance by the Aug. 30 season opener against SEC champion Auburn.
Size and speed are desired for every position in every college football conference, but in the SEC if the bulk of one those two qualities must be sacrificed to accommodate the other, speed and quickness loom larger than size and strength most every time.
From here, it seemed no coincidence that the Razorbacks' most effective defensive tackle for 2013 also weighed the lightest. Darius Philon, 6-3, who is listed 287 pounds and played in the 280s as a redshirt freshman in 2013, began last season playing behind 300-plus seniors Byran Jones and Robert Thomas.
By the end, with Jones dogged by injuries but still gamely playing every game and Thomas suffering a season-ending injury during Game 7, Philon played more than both and posted a better overall year. Philon played every game and started the last five. His 46 tackles from the interior led all Arkansas defensive linemen end to end.
Arkansas Coach Bret Bielema's Razorbacks begin preseason practice Aug. 3 almost assured they will be fresher physically and mentally than the last time Arkansas opened its football season with a conference game.
"Back in the day there were certain things the NCAA didn't monitor," said Bielema, a defensive lineman at Iowa from 1989-92.
The Aug. 30 game in Auburn, Ala., is Arkansas' first season/conference opener since Lou Holtz's 1980 Razorbacks kicked off the college football season against Southwest Conference rival Texas in Austin, Texas, on Labor Day night.
Other than the mandatory first three days without contact practice, college teams during Holtz's Arkansas days could practice in preseason as often as they wanted and in pads as often as they wanted.
With an infernal August heat wave consistently roasting Arkansas in triple digits, Holtz waged three-a-days, two in pads with a special teams workout in between.
The Hogs arrived exhausted in Austin and lost, 23-17. They never quite regained their adrenaline during an injury prone 7-5 season that was a drastically drop-off from 11-1, 9-2-1 and 10-2 peaks from 1977-79.
Today's rules, which allow summer school scholarships that keep players working out together all summer on campus and limit the number of August two-a-day practices, generally induce fresher, better-conditioned teams than most teams were entering their season opener decades ago.
Sports on 07/16/2014