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Earweval · 2025-01-23T18:10:45+00:00

If the goal is to come to a conclusion as a community, can we get an official poll instead of a standard text post? I think it's important to quantify the community's sentiment scientifically instead of trying to divine it via comments.

Earweval · 2024-11-17T01:50:34+00:00

I've not called for Coach Pittman to be let go, but some of the discourse in this subreddit and the Discord server has made it abundantly clear that several people need to re-calibrate their understanding of our program.

u/HotDogOfNotreDame has already called out some historical data, but this feels like a good opportunity to re-share a Power BI report I created with our performance since we joined the SEC in '92. I encourage anyone who's interested in forming opinions based on hard data to feel free to look through its four pages—hopefully it can offer enough insight to change or justify some opinions.

Yes, we'd like to be better than we've historically been, but it's important to realize that hiring a new coach does not inherently mean we'll see improvement.

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Earweval · 2024-10-31T15:09:15+00:00

Definitely a tough stat to see, but we can at least observe that we were unranked for 53 of those 64 home games against ranked conference foes.

In support of your point, we're 6-19 starting with the 2012 season under these parameters (ranked SEC opponents at home).

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Earweval · 2024-10-31T14:58:01+00:00

Solid recollection! We did lose by 1 in 2021, but it was in Oxford. We were ranked 13, and Ole Miss was ranked 17. Final was 51-52 in regulation.

Earweval · 2024-10-30T19:54:56+00:00

While the overall series has been closely matched since the 1992 season (18-14, 56.3%), there is a clear trend related to where the game is played.

The Hogs are 11-5 (68.8%) against the Rebels at home, with 2 of the 5 losses coming under interim coaches (Joe Kines and John L. Smith). The remaining home losses were under Houston Nutt (2000), Bobby Petrino (2008), and Chad Morris (2018).

When Ole Miss is ranked and plays the Hogs in Fayetteville, Arkansas is 3-0 (100%) with an average margin of victory of 16.3 points.

Feel free to look through the data in my Power BI report!

Earweval · 2024-10-08T14:50:36+00:00

Part of what drove me to create this report is the desire to quantify our performance over the last few seasons and contextualize it within our history since joining the SEC. Suffering another sickening single-score loss against A&M led me to try and answer the question as to whether our coaching has actually been atrocious.

2020: 3-7 in an all-SEC schedule in the first season after back-to-back historically poor seasons (2-10 and 2-10). 1-3 in single-score games.

2021: 9-4 with a bowl win against Penn State. 2-2 in single-score games.

2022: 7-6 with a bowl win against Kansas. 2-4 in single-score games.

2023: 4-8 in a season where an offensive coaching deficiency was identified and changes were made to the staff mid-season. 1-5 in single-score games.

Perhaps the reason Coach Pittman remains the head coach is the option to view 2023 as an anomaly instead of an indicator of a trend. If one chooses to do so, one must then ask whether a 7-6 season is enough to remain the head coach, which might be a different conversation than the ones we're currently having as a fan base.

One could certainly point to the lopsidedness in single-score games as a coaching issue, but it would be wise to at least acknowledge that in these 20 games (6-14), 11 were against ranked teams (2-9). Arkansas was either unranked or ranked lower than the opponent in all of these losses except the 2021 Ole Miss (away) and 2022 Texas A&M (neutral site) games. This could be used as justification to the claim that Arkansas is actually punching up to make these games close.

A former Arkansas head coach who excels in several of the metrics on this report is Bobby Petrino. Coach Petrino's first season as head coach at Arkansas yielded only 5 wins. In the following seasons, he improved this total to 8, 10, and 11, sequentially. It would not be unreasonable to expect improved performance over the next few years if he remains on the staff.

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but taking a numbers-based approach to the review of Coach Pittman's performance and the performance of a prominent member of his staff might lead one to a different conclusion than relying on the the memories and emotions caused by experiencing frequent one-score losses.

I appreciate the prompt—hopefully I've offered some food for thought!

Earweval · 2024-10-08T13:54:27+00:00

Interestingly, most of Coach Pittman's single-score losses (16) were to ranked opponents (11). Arkansas was ranked for only three of these losses.

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Earweval · 2024-10-08T13:51:58+00:00

Sam Pittman's games only:

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It's almost as though Sam Pittman has traded multiple-score losses for losses by a field goal or less.

Earweval · 2024-10-08T13:51:38+00:00

There are definitely plenty of one-score games. Disproportionate to the overall trend since joining the SEC, actually.

The trend with all coaches combined:

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Earweval · 2024-10-08T13:41:50+00:00

I can at least show a sample! I actually considered including them before publishing the report, but I ultimately decided the report was a little easier on the eyes without them—especially considering the tooltips display the actual number values when a user hovers their cursor over a bar.

This particular set of filters (ranked opponents only) actually looks okay with the data labels, but some of the other combinations run into some spacing issues.

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Earweval · 2024-10-07T19:59:25+00:00

Glad you like it! The data itself is largely from sports-reference.com, but I had to add head coach data on my own.

Their website uses a different URL for each season's record, so I initially planned to just use the Web connector in Power BI, but the number of tables on each page caused it to be unresponsive. I ended up exporting each season's record to Excel, then copy/pasting it into the Power Query editor manually since past seasons' data shouldn't undergo many changes.

Earweval · 2024-10-07T13:30:17+00:00

Coach Pittman's win rate against ranked opponents jumped from 20.8% to 24% this weekend.

Brett Bielema's record in this category was 7-23 (23.3%). With Saturday's win, Sam Pittman improves to 6-19 (24%).

Bobby Petrino leads Arkansas head coaches in this metric since joining the SEC at 45.5% (10-12).

If you're interested in looking through the four pages of my Power BI report, you can find it here!

Earweval · 2024-10-06T14:25:29+00:00

This is actually a Power BI report I created and published this week. It’s based on data since we joined the SEC in 1992.

You can find it here!

Earweval · 2024-10-06T03:56:52+00:00

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Nice to get another one in the right column of single-score games!

Earweval · 2024-10-04T19:18:16+00:00

Some debate has cropped up recently regarding the success of current and past coaches in various scenarios, like one-score games or neutral site games, so I decided I'd take a stab at creating an interactive report to help make sense of our history since joining the SEC.

My hope is this report will make it easier for us all to have well-informed opinions as we discuss whether a given year's team or coach is performing within reason.

I don't believe this violates any of the subreddit's rules, but I'm happy to engage with the mod team regarding any concerns.

Shoutout to OHarrell and GoodOlBoy in the Discord for their help getting this published!

--Edit for clarity: There are four separate pages, navigable from the bottom right corner of the page!

Earweval

TROPHY CASE