At least there’s Vanderbilt.
Arkansas football fans will, regardless, hold out hope for a bounce-back football season, but USA TODAY – our sister publication – released a re-rank of the 131 schools in FBS on Wednesday and the news was dire for the Razorbacks.
Sam Pittman’s bunch checks in at No. 73, one spot ahead of Syracuse and one spot behind Texas State. The only SEC team ranked lower? Of course it’s the Commodores, who haven’t finished with a winning season since 2013.
More notably – at least, more concretely – the re-rank also predicts each team’s record by the end of the year. Arkansas is projected to finish 4-8, the same record the Razorbacks finished with last year. Wins against Arkansas-Pine Bluff, Alabama-Birmingham and Louisiana Tech are likely three of those four projected wins. But it’s curious where the other may come from.
Arkansas will almost certainly be picked last in the SEC by the league’s assembled media this summer in Hoover, Alabama. Despite the proliferation of bloggers posing as journalists who now attend, the projections there remain the best, most logical that fans will find anywhere.
And USA TODAY will have voters for it.
Bad news for Razorbacks fans.