FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — He is reminiscing now, emotionally and deftly weaving through the unthinkable, the unwatchable, and finally, the beautiful inevitable of the last three years for which no player in his right mind would have signed on.
It’s late on this steamy August night, and these 13 players who have experienced it all, 13 seniors who will officially begin their final season at Arkansas the following morning, hear one final, fitting proclamation from Hogs coach Bret Bielema.
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He didn’t pull them from the abyss. He didn’t find a way out and change the culture of Arkansas football, resuscitating a program left for dead and quickly turning it into the most dangerous team in the best conference in college football.
They did.
“You’re a very special group in my heart for many reasons,” Bielema says, his voice cracking, then rising and growing stronger. “Your last home game here will be Senior Day. My goal is to make that the unhappiest day of your life — for all the right reasons.”
It could have easily been for all the wrong.
Three years ago, Arkansas was the most dysfunctional team in college football, the epicenter for all that can go wrong when egos go unchecked and selfish, reckless behavior supersedes all. Now it might just be the blueprint for all that can be — and should be — in the game.
Three years ago, the Arkansas coach was a self-absorbed dictator, a man who drove his Harley and his career into a ditch — and dragged what looked like a surging Hogs program down with him. They were a shell of a Top 5 program before Bobby Petrino was fired in April of 2012 to begin the downfall, a façade of winning that shrouded a slowly rotting mess.
Now after climbing out of the hole that Petrino dug, that John L. Smith subsequently cratered, Bielema has a team that won just two SEC games in the last two seasons believing they can win the whole damn thing.
“We absolutely can,” said Arkansas wideout Keon Hatcher, one of those 13 seniors who have dug deep over the last two years to truly find who and what they are. “After everything we’ve been through, that’s the most incredible and satisfying part about it.”
They didn’t win an SEC game in Bielema’s first season in 2013, and last year probably could have (and should have) won at least five. By the end of the season, no one in the SEC wanted any part of this suddenly physically intimidating and dominating program, and the Hogs trampled old Southwest Conference rival Texas by 24 points in the Texas Bowl.
As the final minutes ticked off, Arkansas quarterback Brandon Allen mercifully kneeled three straight plays inside the Texas 5.
“Borderline erotic,” Bielema said last month during SEC Media Days, and social media blew up.
The arrogance that was a fixture during Bielema’s wildly successful years at Wisconsin; the bravado that fueled his program to three straight Rose Bowls, now was on full display — after just two measly wins in the SEC. Just Bret being Bret.
That is, until the veneer is pulled back and the story is told, and the reclamation of players and their program and a university and its pride is seen for what it really is: a remarkable journey that, through months of significant change on and off the field, has merely scratched the surface of what could be.
Or borderline erotic.
“Unless you’re in that foxhole,” says Arkansas tailback Jonathan Williams, “you can’t truly appreciate where we were.”
Bret Bielema stepped in after John L. Smith filled the void left by Bobby Petrino. (Getty Images)
Digging out of the hole
If it were just football; if it were Xs and Os and finding the right call or the right play, Arkansas would have been winning the day Bielema stepped on campus after the 2012 season.
But because it was so much more; because what others take for granted on a daily basis had been overlooked for so long and infected the very culture of the program, the heavy lifting began off the field at the source of the problem.
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The areas that destroy programs off the field — academic indifference, social and behavioral issues — were the very things translating to a lack of success on the field.
When Bielema arrived, players were flunking out, missing class and changing majors to find the easiest roads to staying eligible. There was a saying within the football team: “Ds get degrees.”
“I worked in the academic advisement office when I first got here, and what I saw, frankly, was shocking,” says Aaron Henry, a former All-Big Ten defensive back at Wisconsin under Bielema and current Arkansas graduate assistant coach. “Our academic report was horrendous. We had a bunch of guys with sub-par GPAs, guys who wouldn’t go to tutoring appointments, who wouldn’t even push a button to log in to the system. They couldn’t even do that.”
The response from Bielema was simple: you don’t go to class, you don’t play. You miss tutoring appointments, you don’t play — and you pay back the cost of the appointment.
When Bielema arrived at Arkansas, 18 players had sub-2.0 GPAs. At the end of the final session this summer, the team GPA for that semester was just under 3.0. Every single player — all 105 scholarship and walkon players — now has at least a 2.0 GPA.
In his seven seasons at Wisconsin, one of the nation’s elite academic schools and a football program known for its high academic standards (see: Gary Andersen recently leaving for Oregon State because of the strict standards for recruits), Bielema says he never had a season when every player was above 2.0.
“It’s cool to get good grades now,” he says.
If only it were that simple. This was hard work; it was getting players who placed no value on anything off the football field to embrace the reality that what happens off the field is a direct reflection of how you perform on it.
It was making players understand that less than 5 percent of them will play professionally for money — and if they do, the percentage is even less of those that last for more than the NFL average of four years.
In other words, what do you want from your life away from football? Or what do you expect from life if you’re among the 95 percent — or 99 of the 105 players on the roster — that won’t play professionally?
“When you’re young and naive and all you know is football, you don’t think of those things,” said Hatcher. “Guys were just doing whatever they wanted to do, no matter the circumstances.”
But it wasn’t just academics. When Bielema arrived, Arkansas was in the middle of a disturbing run of player behavior issues and had an average of one player arrested every 68 days.
Arkansas had two players arrested in the first three months after Bielema arrived, then went two years and five months without another incident. That’s an eternity in this age of athletes running afoul of the law.
Just this past offseason, defensive end Tevin Beanum was arrested for DWI and illegal possession of alcohol to break the 29-month string. So after talking to Beanum’s mother, Bielema did what any parent would do: he took away Beanum’s car.
Bielema didn’t run off Beanum like he did 20 other players in the first 18 months who didn’t get it or refused to buy in. He used it as another teaching moment, another chance to reinforce the most critical value of change to the roster: respect yourself.
There are no rules against earrings or tattoos. No rules for facial hair or social media. But for this thing to truly change, it had to begin and end with what each and every player expects from themselves.
The way they dress, the way they talk, the way they treat each other and those they associate with on a daily basis. The way they accept responsibility and move forward.
Beanum, a projected starter this fall, responded with a 4.0 GPA this semester.
“It was just so negative here, and that was ground zero,” Bielema said. “Early on, we would give rewards just for best attitudes. The biggest thing I kept telling them from Day 1, over and over, is you need to care about yourself first. If you live clean, you play clean.”
Not coincidentally, when Bielema arrived at Arkansas, the Hogs were the most penalized team in the SEC. By the end of his first season, they were the least.
Little things few recognize off the field eventually lead to big things few can deny on it.
What he walked into ...
To understand what this means to Bielema and every single player at Arkansas, you must first understand where each was when it all began.
Bielema was at his dream job. He was working for a mentor and one of his closest friends in the business (Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez), and his parents were less than three hours away and could follow his every move. His best friend from college lived close by and they had dinner every Thursday night.
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He was winning like few had in the Big Ten, and had taken the Badgers to three straight Rose Bowls — the first time in nearly four decades that a Big Ten team had done so.
“I could have stayed there forever,” Bielema said. “I’m sure there were more than a few people who thought I was crazy to leave.”
Especially considering what he was getting into. Despite winning 21 games in Petrino’s last two seasons, the foundation had cracks all over it. If academic and behavioral problems weren’t enough, the NFL atmosphere Petrino had created was feeding it on a daily basis.
Petrino’s office was on the second floor, and if a player was on the second floor, it usually was because he was in trouble.
“There was no such thing as an open door like there is now,” Allen said. “With (Petrino), I never wanted to go up there. No one did. It was kind of a scary deal.”
Now imagine this: Napoleon is banished and the leader of the minions is elevated to head coach — and he’s simply holding on until the next head coach arrives.
“So you’re playing for a tyrant, and you’re tight. He leaves, and now you get a little loose,” said Alfred Davis, a captain on the 2012 team and currently a graduate assistant. “I don’t think our starting free safety went to class the whole week when we played Ole Miss. He didn’t have to; the coaches weren’t going to do anything, they weren’t checking up on him. They were worried about their own futures.
“I had one coach who told me in the middle of the season, ‘Hey, Al, this thing is going bad. Do what you can and get yours. You need tape for the NFL.’ Players were doing whatever they wanted to do.”
Said Allen: “We kind of just threw in the towel.”
This is what Bielema walked into. This is what it had become for a group of players who, at the very least, signed on to play for Petrino — who, despite his flaws, was winning games and getting players to the NFL.
Or as one Arkansas staffer summed it up: “he was an asshole, but he was our asshole.”
It should come as no surprise then, that when Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long hired Bielema, he specifically told him he wasn’t expecting anything in Year 1. Or Year 2.
“It’s not easy for any coach to walk into a situation where he’s coaching players that he didn’t recruit,” Long said. “But Bret had a situation with many more complications than just players that weren’t his. ”
Now think about that Texas game to end last season. Think about how the Hogs arrived at that moment, losing four games by a combined 22 points because this team with a brand new identity is still figuring out how to win games in the fourth quarter.
Think about where this program has been and how the culture was changed and why what seemed like a meaningless bowl game, an appetizer to the College Football Playoff in the grand scheme, was “borderline erotic” when Allen was kneeling on the ball to end the game.
“The whole season, the last two years, kind of came to head in that game,” Williams said. “We finally realized what all this was for, and really, how good it can be.”
A few days later, Williams announced he would skip the NFL Draft and return to Arkansas for his senior season. Eight months later, he was sitting in that senior meeting, staring at a season of huge hope.
“There’s not a person on this team that thinks we can’t win the SEC,” Williams said.
The mere idea of it all, in such a short turnaround, is mind-boggling.
Smiling for the future
Hours after that emotional senior meeting, Bielema met with his freshman class alone in the team room.
This group of 24 players might be the best recruiting class assembled at Arkansas — and surely the best since the Hogs entered the SEC in 1992. There’s tailback Rawleigh Williams, who Bielema compares to Wisconsin All-American Montee Ball, and linebacker Derrick Graham, who already has grown out of his position (he has added 25 pounds) and likely will move to rush end.
About and hour before meeting the freshmen, Bielema is told by a staff member that a few of the freshmen stayed overnight in the football complex for fear of oversleeping. He smiled.
He has them right where he wants them.
“In 20 years as a coach and five as a player,” Bielema’s voice booms in the meeting room, “I have never, ever, ever been late to a meeting or anything. If it’s important enough for you, it can be done.”
If it’s important enough, if you want to change bad enough, it might just end with the unhappiest day of your life.
For all the right reasons.