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FAYETTEVILLE — In their weekly meeting the day after Arkansas was blown out by Mississippi State, Hunter Yurachek made it clear to Chad Morris that the next game was vital to his future.

When the Razorbacks laid an egg in a 45-19 home loss to Western Kentucky - their fourth loss to a Group of Five school in two years - six days later, the second-year athletics director had no choice but to pull the plug on Morris’ tenure as head coach after just 22 games.

Yurachek said that sealed his decision to fire Morris. He recommended the move Saturday night to UA Chancellor Joe Steinmetz, who then passed it along to UA President Donald Bobbitt and the Board of Trustees for final approval.

It was not a direct response to the one loss, but rather a cumulation over the last several weeks, starting with blowing a 13-0 lead at Kentucky on Oct. 12.

“I thought our season really turned when we couldn’t close out that game and get that win against Kentucky,” Yurachek said Monday afternoon. “I thought at that point in time, our student-athletes were starting to lose belief on if we could actually ever get over the hump with the current leadership.”

Including the Wildcats’ touchdown just before halftime in that game, the Razorbacks have been outscored 222-67 since building that two-possession lead. They also haven’t led in any of the last four games.

Those were concerning signs of regression for Yurachek, who said he didn’t expect this team to compete for an SEC title, but rather just “be competitive game-in and game-out.” The lack of competitiveness is why he made the move despite Morris’ plea for more time in his postgame press conference Saturday and the subsequent criticism from national media that he wasn’t given time to build a program.

“I didn’t have tremendously high expectations for us this season,” Yurachek said. “One of those expectations was for us to go out each and every Saturday and compete like the Razorback football program should compete, and I thought we were no longer doing that and I don’t think it takes time to motivate the players within your program to compete.”

The decision was also necessitated because of what he saw from the Razorbacks’ roster of 120 players, which Yurachek said was his primary focus.

“As I spent time with our student-athletes before, during and after games, I got the sense that they were no longer enjoying that experience on Saturdays,” Yurachek said. “We had 120 student-athletes within our football program that were no longer experiencing the success I thought they needed to experience.”

Yurachek said he didn’t specifically reach out to anyone other than Steinmetz and members of the Board of Trustees during the process because he already knew what the common fan felt.

A quick search on Twitter shows countless messages directed to him, plus the announced attendance of 42,985 for Saturday’s game was the lowest for a Fayetteville home game since 1997. It was the seventh time in the Razorbacks’ last nine home games they’ve sold less than 60,000 tickets after doing so just three times in the previous 94 games at Reynolds Razorback Stadium.

“I think that many of our fans made their thoughts known through various mediums about what they thought about our program,” Yurachek said. “I think you could look at our attendance over the past couple of weeks and see what our fanbase felt about our program moving forward.”

Now a day removed from informing Morris he was fired - a meeting that ended “with a hug and some tears” - Yurachek has shifted his focus to a coaching search. He said he has “no doubt” there will be a “very strong candidate pool” for the job and listed four reasons why: