Eyes were all on newly hired Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek as he introduced one of the flashiest new toys in college football. Yurachek hadn't hired Chad Morris, but he bore the weight of what ended up being the worst, most disengaging time period in Razorback football history.
Morris came in hot with corny sayings and an evangelical-esque quality. He lured in some eye-catching recruits but his inability -- nay, refusal -- to connect with the mental state of Arkansas set the stage for record-breaking poor performance. Morris, like many transplants to our area who don't stay long, never spent much time here, at least not quality time embracing the surroundings.
Enter Sam Pittman. At a time when fans were reeling from promises unkept, Pittman's humble demeanor and no-frills attitude struck a harmonious chord. His emotional first press conference drew critique from the outside world but Arkansans ate that passion up with a fork and licked the plate. Void of the cliched rhetoric and "coach speak," the only speaking Pittman did was from the heart.
For some reason or another, Arkansans tend to thrive as the overlooked under-dog. We often see our road as uphill, be it by circumstance or virtue, but the views at the top will take your breath away. Just like the autumn, painted leaves of the Ozarks (No, not "Oz" as some clever branding team is trying to make happen) showing off for the casual, overlook gaze.
Sometime last week, a group of socially connected affluents organized together as the Northwest Arkansas Council furthered their stranglehold on culture building, this time through a highly publicized incentivization program: $10,000 and a bike to move to Northwest Arkansas.
Queue the media grab and local spin machine, standard issue stuff. Maybe they knew the backlash they would receive or perhaps they so brazenly thought that locals were too stupid to see it for what it was. Either way, news broke around town and social threads filled with "(insert expletive) the Walton's" and "What a slap in the face." Yikes on all of those free bikes!
While the pseudo-elites at fancy gala tables will likely never feel the gut punch that came to the working-class ladder rung last week, their loosening tether to reality was on full display. From a basic PR perspective, it's rather ... uh ... ill-advised to run a flashy recruitment campaign all over the country while your own state's people are being ravaged by a pandemic and on the verge of economic peril.
"There ain't no 'We're going to go out and recruit, we're going to do this and that. ... Whoever we had on the plane is all we need," Pittman told his team after breaking one of those poor performance records.
Guess what, Northwest Arkansas Council, et al.? Everything you need is right here, even if it's not as flashy as the new model up the road. Too many people right here are living paycheck to paycheck, fighting and begging for someone to just believe in them.
Do we believe?
Blake Joseph Sandridge is a longtime Fayetteville resident, graduate of the University of Arkansas and owner of a business in Bentonville.