Razorbacks Finish Special Football Season

Two heartbreaking losses to close out the year have a lot of Razorback fans feeling a bit glum these days. That's bound to happen when your team goes toe-to-toe with two of the best teams in the country (LSU and Florida) and comes up on the short end both times. I can hear the diehards bemoaning their team's predicament even now: "We were just a couple of plays away! If it weren't for the special teams mistakes, we'd be in the national title game! If only we could have passed the ball a little better!"

All the crying does is make you feel a little bit better about how it all went down. But it does nothing to change the three losses that 10-3 Arkansas will carry into its Capitol One Bowl matchup with Wisconsin. That game---slated for Orlando, Florida, at 1 o'clock on New Year's Day--- is a tough consolation prize for a fanbase that had visions of Arizona and New Orleans just weeks ago. Still, a "prize" it is for a team that barely missed its first-ever BCS appearance this year. In effect, Arkansas ended up with a pretty good deal out of it: the best non-BCS game there is and a very formidable opponent. One can make the argument that Wisconsin is a better team than Notre Dame, the school Arkansas would have been paired with had it made it to the Sugar Bowl in the Big Easy.

It's important for Arkansas fans to remember as well what this season was ultimately about. Sure, the fanciful talk of a national title appearance seemed great at the time, but there's a very slim margin of error in that regard for a team that wasn't even in the Top 25 polls at the start of the season. No, this year wasn't about that. Not yet, at least. This season the Arkansas Razorbacks went out and earned their way back into national relevancy. For the first time in a long time the Razorbacks were as good as any team in the country, and the national media respected them as such. The Hawgs were televised no less than eight times this year, which is a huge measuring stick for a program that was an afterthought for many college football pundits over the past five years. And Arkansas not only bashed heads with the best in the country this year, the Razorbacks beat a bunch of them too. You throw in Darren McFadden's amazing season (which will see him as a runner-up finalist to Troy Smith this weekend) and it's hard not to see Arkansas being back on a similar stage next year, with Darren McFadden as the early season Heisman favorite.

This was a truly great season for Arkansas football. The pills of defeat against LSU and Florida are tough ones to swallow, for sure, but they are better digestible when your brain wraps itself around the bright future that Razorback pigskin has in front of it.


-JAB