For the second-consecutive week, Arkansas will face another ranked SEC opponent when it hosts No. 2 Alabama on Saturday. The Crimson Tide holds a 14-game winning streak against the Razorbacks, but in Arkansas' second season under Sam Pittman, it came to Tuscaloosa and lost by seven points. It was the closest margin between the two teams since 2015 when Alabama won the game by 15 points.
With the 31st matchup between the two programs on the horizon, here is everything Pittman said about facing Alabama this week during Wednesday's SEC teleconference.
Opening statement...
"Well, we're really excited to play the University of Alabama, a wonderful team, and to get them at home, it'll be exciting for our fans and for our university, to get a great program like that on campus. We have the ultimate respect, they have a lot of fine players and two of the brightest on both sides of the ball in the country. We have a huge, huge challenge, but we've had a good week of practice and exciting for the opportunity."
On Drew Sanders moving to inside linebacker...
"Yeah, he wanted to play on the inside. Obviously, we had an opportunity with Grant Morgan graduating, so I'm sure he saw that and he wanted to play in there and we certainly had the opportunities for that. Of course, we're using him on the edge as well, but that was something that he was adamant about in the short, brief recruiting process that we had there."
On what it is going to take to beat Alabama...
"We had to play a really clean game, you can't turn the ball over. You have to convert situational football, you have to score touchdowns in the red zone, you have to make the third—and—1s, if you go for it on fourth, you have to convert. They're just a really good team that you can't make mistakes again because if they do they're like piranhas, they feast on that. I've played them several times and they're always well coached and disciplined. They don't beat themselves. They obviously have great athletes, but I think a big key is going into the game believing you can win. I think there's not a whole lot of teams in the country that go into a game thinking they can beat Alabama I may be wrong but there's some but there's not a bunch. You have to have that belief and you have a chance and if you can get a whole team full of guys that believe they can win, then you have the chance.
On how the gameplan changes when facing Alabama...
"Well, the game plan you can look at it as very similar to each and every year while Coach Saban has been the head coach at Alabama. They're going to be very similar to what we had at Georgia because Kirby Smart was there and Dan Lanning and Oregon all these different people that's gone through Saban's coaching tree. You hit the nail on the head, it's the players, so what you try to do going into the game is you find them, and they have several. I think Henry To'oTo'o is playing some of the best football I've ever seen, so you go in there you go, 'Okay, who do they have that can ruin our gameplan? And they had several guys obviously you mentioned Will Anderson and I think To'oTo'o is one of those guys, Byron Young, I mean they have a lot of guys, Jaylen Moody, Demarcco Hellams, Jordan Battle, they have a lot of guys that can wreck your gameplan. You just go through that and we have a base game plan and then you better have an answer for their freakish-type athletes and players. They've got so many of them. It's hard to do, but certainly, you try to eliminate the guys that can change the outcome of the game. We know where they're going to line up, just like everybody who played them. The problem is blocking and running past them and so we have our specifics for that, but other than that, they've had the same type of defense for years, just the players have been different."
