Silverfield starts with Razorbacks having no past to compare

New coach arrives at Arkansas coaching Hogs football without true baseline to judge progress

Arkansas Razorbacks new football coach Ryan Silverfield speaks to the crowd during halftime against the Louisville Cardinals at Bud Walton Arena. | Nelson Chenault-Imagn Images

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — College football loves tradition.

Schedules that haven't changed much in decades. Rivalries. Arguments about how things “used to be done.”

Arkansas football once fit neatly into that world. Coaches inherited rosters, redshirted freshmen, waited three years, then found out if they were right or wrong.

That world no longer exists, and Ryan Silverfield is walking proof.

Silverfield took the Razorbacks job at exactly the wrong time if he wanted helpful comparisons.

He is the first Hogs coach hired after the NCAA transfer portal became the sport’s main form of transportation. Not a side road. Not a shortcut. The whole highway.

That means Silverfield arrived with something no previous Hogs' coach ever had — no baseline. Sam Pittman spent nearly 40 years preparing to be a head coach, got his dream job and they changed the rules in less than three months.

There is no “be patient, it worked last time.” The Razorbacks’ past is stored in a museum now, right next to VHS tapes and handwritten depth charts.

It "hasn't worked last time" in nearly 20 years.

Every coach before Silverfield could point backward. He can only look around and hope the roster sticks together long enough to remember each other’s names.

Arkansas didn’t hand him a rebuild. It gave him a moving target.

The Hogs he inherited are not the result of a long plan. They are the result of timing, availability, and who answered the phone.

Some players arrived last winter. Others arrived last week. A few might leave tomorrow.

In other words, the Razorbacks have been scrambling for at least nine seasons. That's one short of 10 years or, some would call it a decade.

Judging that kind of roster used to be hard. Now it is almost a guessing game.

Silverfield isn’t stepping into history. He’s stepping into a reset button that gets pressed every offseason.

Arkansas Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman on the field before a game with the Ole Miss Rebels at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss. | Ted McClenning-allHOGS Images

No yardstick, just vibes, wins

Normally, new coaches get judged against ghosts. The last guy’s record. The last rebuild. The last promise that didn’t quite work.

Silverfield won't even get that courtesy. A lot of folks really don't remember the last time things worked well with any consistency.

The Razorbacks coaches before him operated under different laws. They recruited high school kids, waited for them to grow up, and hoped nobody noticed them along the way.

They had timelines. The ones that didn't work out had excuses. There was patience built into the system.

The portal erased all of it.

Now, if a position group struggles, the response isn’t development. It’s shopping. If it succeeds, nobody is quite sure why.

Coaching? Talent? Chemistry? Luck? Pick one. Or all of them.

That makes evaluation tricky. If the Hogs improve, critics will say Silverfield just found the right transfers.

If the Razorbacks stumble, critics will say he missed in the portal. Either way, the process disappears behind the result.

There is no Year 2 leap anymore. There is no Year 3 payoff. Those ideas require players to stay put, which now feels optional at best.

The Razorbacks are not rebuilding in stages. They are rebuilding in cycles, sometimes more than one at a time.

And the clock never stops.

Arkansas Razorbacks former coach Chad Morris on the outdoor practice fields at Fayetteville, Ark., on Nov. 9, 2019. | Andy Hodges-Hogs on SI Images

Coaching in the age of roster roulette

The NCAA likes to say the transfer portal empowers players. Coaches might agree — quietly, after checking who just entered.

For Silverfield, the portal is both tool and trap. It lets him fix holes fast.

It also means the holes can re-open just as fast. Continuity is now a luxury item.

Culture is harder to build when the locker room changes every semester. Leadership has to be chosen quickly because tomorrow’s captain might be next week’s transfer entry.

Razorback fans will want signs of direction. A win streak may not mean stability. A losing stretch may not mean failure.

Silverfield’s job is less about building layers and more about balancing plates. And the Hogs' job nobody likes to talk about is deciding how to judge him.

There is no clean comparison. There is no fair historical line. The Razorbacks are now judged in the same messy present as everyone else.

Silverfield didn’t ask to be the first Arkansas coach in this reality. He just happens to be the one holding the whistle when the rules finished changing.

That means his early seasons might look strange. The record might swing.

The roster will certainly churn. And the explanations will sound unsatisfying. But that’s the sport now.

The Razorbacks hired a manager of chaos. It's not his fault. Blame the rules.

Silverfield gets to prove whether that’s enough — without a measuring stick to tell anyone what “enough” even looks like.

Key takeaways

• Ryan Silverfield is Arkansas’s first coach hired fully into the transfer-portal era.
• The Razorbacks have no usable past model for judging progress or rebuilding.
• Coaching success now depends on adaptability more than long-term continuity.