Why Arkansas football bet on Chad Morris
The anti-Bielema offense
Bret Bielma began his coaching career as an assistant coach at Iowa. He served as a defensive coordinator at Wisconsin before being promoted to the head coaching position. He became the Arkansas football head coach in 2013. For Arkansas, he implemented the traditional Midwest winter weather smash mouth offense.
Like Auburn’s Gus Malzahn before him and like new Tennessee head coach Jeremy Pruitt , who will join the SEC along with Morris for the 2018 season, Chad Morris comes to the college ranks after serving as a high school coach.
As an offensive mind, Morris is the anti-Bielema. He developed his offensive philosophy and tactics in the laboratory of sun-baked east Texas High School football. He took his concepts to Tulsa and then Clemson, eventually having enough success to command the highest salary of any assistant coach in the country.
Morris produced a nationally ranked top 10 offense at the three collegiate positions he held. While Bielema was at Arkansas, the Razorback offense cracked the top 30 nationally once in total offense and ranked 93 in 2017.
The season before Morris joined SMU as head coach, the Mustangs ranked number 128 nationally in total offense. In Morris’s first year, the SMU offense ranked 76, and in year two ranked 55. In Morris’s third year, the SMU offense ranked number 12 nationally in total offense and number 8 in scoring offense.
Defense, too
Down south, they dance with who brung ‘em. Morris will make offense a priority and he will be successful. To achieve the ultimate success at Arkansas, he must harvest talent from those fertile Texas fields and lock down the necessary Arkansas talent to also produce an imposing defense.
Morris is not hiding his defensive thoughts behind a poker face. “I’ll hire the best defensive coordinator in all of college football. That’s our standard.”
That’s bold talk intended to send the message that Morris gets it: like the rest of the SEC, Arkansas will have to play great defense to win.
Morris will recruit well east Texas. If he focuses his assistant coaches on the Arkansas home turf as he articulated, he will keep Arkansas talent at home. But is that enough to fully stock a team competitive with Alabama, LSU, and the rest of the SEC West?
