What a game. I have a 10 month old. While we were watching the game on Saturday, we had to console him after every big play because my whole family (mainly me) would scream and upset him (he needs to toughen up). As we sat through John L's icing time-out, I told him to get ready to cry because I was about to be yelling one way or another. Then, a calm came over me. Alcoholics may refer to it as a moment of clarity, and I knew that Rose was making that kick and we were winning. The kick went through and I was calm as a cucumber and the baby didn't cry. The optimist in me thinks that a new day may have dawned and we can expect to win close games and make game-winning kicks now. I still have a lot of WAOM in me, but I'm starting to believe.

For the game, I think we played a very good team. They're not a top 10 team and probably wouldn't have been even with Petrino. However, this is not the dumpster fire that lost to ULM, destroyed by A&M, and beaten by Rutgers. I think Arkansas was on decent footing and would won against a lot of teams.

SUCSESS RATE

This is a measure of staying on schedule which is very big to Freeze. You can see that even though we were down 10-0 at the end of the first quarter, we were playing well against them. Then we blew up in the second quarter and built our lead. This was a change from most 2nd quarters this year. We fell apart a little in the third - I thought we were screwed when we couldn't get up by two scores. Then we did enough to win in the 4th. Most of our successful plays were on the game winning drive. We still need to get the Cutcliffe out of him, I think we may could have been up by 3 scores if we kept throwing the ball in the 2nd half, but that complaint aside, a masterful job by Freeze.

PLAY CALLING

While I said that Freeze was light on passing, he was below last year's national average of 60% runs on standard downs and 33% on passing downs. It was odd to see Arkansas so content to run on 3rd and long. It worked several times, but we stopped a draw play on a critical 3rd down late in the game.

We only averaged 1.7 YPC in the second half, meanwhile Wallace was 15 of 18 for 143 yards in the second half. He did take 2 sacks in the second half. I guess Freeze was just trying to avoid the negative play as he knew we could move it on them when we needed to.

WR TARGETS

How about the emergence of Randall Mackey in the passing game? He targets 8 times and caught 7 balls for 99 yards. Moncrief gonna Moncrief, catching all 8 targets for a workman like 60 yards. Sanders had a nice day with 7 targets for 5 catches for 40 yards and his first TD of his career.

Interestingly, in passing situations, we went away from Moncrief and Sanders, instead opting for Mackey and Jeff Scott.

OL PLAY

This was the worst run blocking we have done all year. To borrow a phrase from Jim Mora, we couldn't do diddly-poo running the ball. We only got 1.3 OL yards per carry. OL yards are derived by giving the OL 100% credit for the first 4 yards of a run, splitting the credit between 5 and 10, then giving the RB 100% of the credit for yards after that - highlight yards.

Our RBs didn't do much better when they were able to get past the line, only picking up 36 HL yards.

I'm not very good at noticing this type of stuff when I'm watching the game, but Arkansas must have made a concerted effort to put 8 in the box and stop our run game and make Wallace beat them

He did.

Overall he had a great day, but it was really spectacular when we kept him ahead of the chains.

He did enough in passing situations, but took two sacks as well.

It's fun to watch football again.