Tag: Arkansas Liberty

SEC Wire sites make Week 10 picks – one of SEC editor picked Liberty

SEC experts are going with Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas in the week’s biggest matchups.

Liberty is the ranked team. Arkansas is the favored team. One of them is going to lose Saturday.

Per Wire sites editors, it’s going to be the Flames.

SEC Wire editors made their weekly picks of the biggest conference games and a majority weren’t surprises in the majority. But there’s always one, isn’t there? Always one person who goes against the grain.

The reality is that Week 10 might be the most important week of the season in college football’s best conference. The headline game of Georgia vs. Tennessee is as good as it gets. LSU and Alabama are played several classics in the last 15 years alone. Arkansas needs a win against an out-of-league foe. Even Florida and Texas A&M holds intrigue as they’re playing for their proverbial lives.

You can see all the SEC Wire picks below, but most importantly, see just how picked against the Razorbacks.

Five reasons Liberty will beat Arkansas on Saturday

Arkansas might not lose Saturday against Liberty, but the Flames are legit scary and could pull the upset.

Liberty University is largely known for things other than football.

But coach Hugh Freeze has made the Flames a staple of quality since they arrived on the FBS scene in 2018. On Saturday, Liberty will test itself against the big boys of the sport by playing at an SEC school. Specifically Arkansas.

Only one of the two teams is ranked.

It ain’t the Hogs.

Still, Arkansas is favored and in something of a deseperate mode, though almost no one is painting it that way. The Razorbacks have four games to clinch bowl-eligibility and they need but one win. However, the schedule returns to the gauntlet of the SEC after the Liberty game.

And even though the Flames are an Independent and fresh on the scene of major college football, they’re not a pushover. Our Razorbacks Wire official picks will come early Saturday morning. But for now, here are five reasons Freeze and his bunch can leave Fayetteville as victors.

Lose to Hugh Freeze and Liberty? That would be a disaster for Arkansas on multiple fronts

Liberty is Arkansas’ most important game of the season and it isn’t really close.

College football is a strange game. Rather, the way people think about it is strange, anyway.

Arkansas, an SEC team that has long been in the middle pack of the league (sometimes high, oftentimes low) is not ranked heading into Week 10 of the 2022 season. Deservedly. The Razorbacks are a bubble team for the Top 25. Good enough to get some consideration, but lacking the results to be concrete. At 5-3 and 1-3 in league play, that placing is deserved.

The Razorbacks host Liberty on Saturday in Fayetteville for homecoming. The Flames are a college football Independent, they have no conference. The program only joined the FBS ranks in 2018. They are coached by Hugh Freeze, formerly of SEC’s own Ole Miss, and are loaded with former major-conference players from the transfer portal. Freeze has led the team to a 7-1 record and a No. 23 ranking heading into the final quarter of the year.

Arkansas is a two-touchdown favorite. Give or take.

Not sure how that works. Las Vegas and the people who make the odds are not the same as the folks who vote on the Top 25 or create the College Football Playoff standings, certainly. But the discrepancy between two similarly-considered teams on paper versus what the prognosticators think will be the reality usually isn’t that stark.

An Arkansas loss, then, would be all the more a signal of doom. Losing to a team at home against whom you were favored by two touchdowns? Unacceptable on the best days. When it would put the Razorbacks into a tight spot as it relates to bowl-eligibility, watch out.

The reality is Arkansas needs the win in the worst way. Liberty? Nah. The Flames have nothing to lose.

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Watch: Liberty coach Hugh Freeze taught his players to Call The Hogs

Hugh Freeze once applied to coach girls high school basketball in Rogers, so he knows the Hog Call.

Few coaches in college football are as familiar with the Arkansas Razorbacks way of life as Liberty head man Hugh Freeze.

The former Ole Miss and Arkansas State coach once applied to coach girls high school basketball in Rogers, Arkansas, before getting his start in college football. He would have right next door to Fayetteville, practically. It’s possible he even saw a game from the Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium stands before he saw one from the sidelines.

That kind of insight could be helpful to his players at Liberty who probably have never experienced a Hog Call. To anyone unfamiliar with it, the experience can be, well, jarring.

So Freeze showed his players how to do it this week.

Freeze played Arkansas five times while he coaching the Rebels from 2012 to 2016. Ole Miss won the first two meetings but lost from 2014-16. The school later had to vacate a number of wins from the Freeze era because of recruiting and academic violations during his tenure and the tenure of coach Houston Nutt before him.

Liberty hired Freeze ahead of the 2019 season. The Flames have a record of 33-12 in his three-plus seasons and will enter Saturday’s game as the No. 23 team in the country.

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