Fans Should Have High Expectations for Razorbacks Every Season
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Anybody expecting fans to have any sort of "realistic" expectations for Arkansas in any sport is absolutely wrong. That's a big part of how the Razorbacks find themselves in this annual hole every year. Disappointment at end of the year is overwhelmingly the result at the end of each season.
That's in every sports at every level. In college football there were over 100 schools disappointed when Michigan won and nobody else did. When Kansas City won the Super Bowl last weekend, there were 31 fan bases disappointed. The expectation should be for championships.
Otherwise a mindset of accepting anything less becomes okay. If the Hogs win nine games this year in football and certain fans are fine with that, it's their decision.
The question every year a championship doesn't happen should be "what are you doing to fix it?" There was a time when around Arkansas the expectation each season year was a championship. Frank Broyles had to answer the questions of how a one-loss season was going to be fixed.
It was Lou Holtz who once said right after taking the Razorbacks' job in 1976 after Broyles' .500 last team, "people usually live up to or down to your expectations." Like a lot of those things Lou said, it turned out to be prophetic for nearly every phase of life.
Football in particular for the Hogs has fallen to the level where the media makes excuses for failure, drawing on games the last decade where Arkansas has gotten close to beating top tier teams. People have taken to telling fans of a program that's never won a national championship that resulted in an actual trophy to never expect one.
Baseball's now in those crosshairs of that conversation. Razorbacks coach Dave Van Horn is probably glad to have those expectations. It's a theme you tend to hear among championship-level people.
On paper right now, Arkansas should have a decent shot at getting to Omaha, which is about the best expectation anyone can have. No one can predict how injuries will play out or what the weather will be in Omaha this year for the College World Series.
But until everybody starts having those "unrealistic" expectations, nothing's going to change. It's pretty easy to get comfortable with being mediocre. Winners don't question high expectations, but losers complain and are disappointed every year.
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