What to expect from Barry Odom's defense in Year 1

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Coming off back-to-back 10-loss seasons, there is a lot of room for improvement at Arkansas in all three phases of the game.

In an effort to inject some life into the program, the Razorbacks brought in former offensive line coach Sam Pittman as their new head coach. He then hired Kendal Briles and Barry Odom as his offensive and defensive coordinators, respectively.

Although Pittman doesn’t have any experience leading a Division I football team, the two coordinators are very experienced and well respected for what they do.

To develop some realistic expectations for 2020 - which is hard to do considering the unprecedented times we’re in with the coronavirus pandemic - HawgBeat decided to look at both coordinators’ histories.

On offense, we examined each of Briles’ three previous stops - one-year stints at Florida Atlantic, Houston and Florida State - to come up with how big of an immediate impact he’s made on those units in a short amount of time and then used that to calculate what it would look like at Arkansas.

The other side of the ball is a little more tricky. Unlike his counterpart, Odom has not jumped from job to job in recent years. In fact, almost his entire coaching career has been spent at two schools: Memphis and Missouri, his alma mater.

For the purpose of this exercise, we’re going to focus on his three-year stint as Memphis’ defensive coordinator from 2012-14, the first time he was in charge of an entire unit.

Odom’s most recent tenure at Missouri included just one year as defensive coordinator before he was elevated to head coach, which comes with many more responsibilities than just focusing on one side of the ball. That said, he had a top-five defense as a coordinator in 2015 and top-20 defense last season as head coach.

Granted it was at a Group of Five program, but the job Odom inherited at Memphis is statistically similar to what he’s walking into at Arkansas. The Tigers had double-digit losses in each of the two previous years, leading to a head coach being fired after just two seasons.

During a 2-10 campaign in 2011, Memphis had one of the worst defenses in the country. It ranked 105th in scoring defense and 117th - out of 120 teams - in total defense.

As illustrated in the graphs below, Odom’s arrival to the Liberty Bowl made an immediate impact and he improved the unit in each of his three seasons.

Under Odom’s leadership, the Tigers reduced their scoring defense by about 5 points per game each year, while the other categories experienced a dramatic improvement in his first year followed by smaller jumps the next two seasons.

In Fayetteville, the former Missouri head coach is inheriting a defense that finished 2019 ranked 110th in total defense and 124th - out of 130 teams - in scoring defense. Both categories were also the worst in school history.

It’s difficult to quantify how much missing spring ball because of the pandemic will hinder his ability to do so, but the Razorbacks would certainly take a similar jump as the one Memphis experienced in Odom’s first season as defensive coordinator.

The chart below shows where Arkansas ranked in a few key defensive categories last season, as well as what it would look like if it made the same percentage jumps as the Tigers and where those figures would have ranked last season.