National Signing Day 2020 has come and gone, and it's clear that Arkansas finished as a winner on the day. While their top-40 ranked recruiting class isn't up to new, first-time head coach Sam Pittman's standards, it was remarkable what he and his staff were able to do with such a short amount of time to find, recruit and sign new Razorbacks.
"We’re the University of Arkansas, and we’d like to do better than what we did," Pittman said Wednesday. "We expected to do every bit of what we did, and we expected to do better to be honest with you. This one we just didn’t quite have as much time as we wanted, but we’ll do better."
As any college coach would tell you, recruiting is the lifeblood of a program. Any school that loses (or fires) their head coach after the season is automatically hampering their recruiting efforts in the short term. The timing, the circumstances and the aftermath of Chad Morris's firing made Pittman's job much harder.
During the near-month long coaching search, Arkansas lost eight of Morris's 2020 commits, leaving three in-state prospects and three others that eventually would not be retained by the new staff.
The early National Signing Period, now in its third year of existence, has been a major hamstringing factor for new head coaches taking over programs and, despite three other head coaching changes in the SEC, no one had it harder than Pittman.
Eli Drinkwitz at Missouri and Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss were both hired in less than 10 days after their predecessors were fired, making it much easier to hold onto their existing commits heading into the early signing period a week later.
Missouri held on to 10 of Barry Odom's guys and Ole Miss held on to eight of Matt Luke's commits. Arkansas signed fewer (7) than both of those programs in the early period.
Mississippi State's class is ranked higher than Arkansas's but Mike Leach hardly had any work to do as Joe Moorhead signed almost a full class in the early signing period before he was fired.
Arkansas fans already saw what a signing class post-coaching change can look like when Chad Morris went through the same thing in 2018. Morris's class didn't even get up to 20 commits and it greatly impacted their ranking. That class finished ranked No.61.
But Sam Pittman's class is full of prospects who hold other Power 5 offers (a sign of great potential) and he also added three grad transfers who they expect to contribute immediately.
There were a few former commits Pittman and his staff would've liked to have pulled back into the class for signing day and there are a few kids that would qualify as "sleepers," but the new head hog made one point very clear, they want players who really want to be Razorbacks and players who fill needs on the roster. The staff didn't care how far they had to travel to get find those recruits.
After early signing, 85% of the top talent in the nation was signed, so Arkansas went to 10 different states to get their class of 23. They worked incredibly hard in January and hosted more than 20 official visitors.
"I’ll be honest, I didn’t know we had 10 different states and all that kind of stuff," Pittman said. "We were going to so fast, we were just trying to get people that we liked that liked us. We have a private plane. We can get all over the place. Just like every other school in the SEC."
The job Pittman and his staff did in a month and a half of recruiting, pulling prospects out of their home states, some away from other SEC programs, bodes very well for the future of Arkansas football and there will be many higher-ranked classes ahead.
