Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek Backs Ryan Silverfield's Plan

It has been a rough month in Fayetteville. Arkansas beat North Alabama 31-14 to open Ryan Silverfield's 1st season, then got hammered 43-10 by No. 20 Utah and 45-17 by No. 2 Georgia. Before the Georgia game, videos of empty parking lots and a nearly empty stadium racked up millions of views as fans stayed home in protest. Most of that anger isn't aimed at the rookie head coach. It's aimed at the guy who hired him.

That guy is Hunter Yurachek. The Arkansas Board of Trustees has started a formal review of the athletic department to evaluate the resources available to the football program and find ways to make it more competitive. Calls to fire Yurachek are all over social media. Brett McMurphy took a different angle and argued that dumping the AD right now might make things worse.

Brett McMurphy

@Brett_McMurphy

Arkansas may have a football problem. Firing athletic director Hunter Yurachek could create a bigger one for Razorbacks t.co/9a6VatZrN6

The case against Yurachek is pretty simple. He fired Sam Pittman last September and said at the time that Pittman never got the financial commitment he needed to win in the SEC. Then he brought in Silverfield and promised a new commitment to football. The numbers haven't matched the promise. Arkansas is estimated to have the lowest roster spending in the SEC at $22 million to $25 million, while the league average is somewhere between $33 million and $38 million. You don't have to be a genius to figure out what happens when you bring the smallest checkbook into the toughest conference in the country.

Yurachek isn't flinching. His pitch to McMurphy was all about building a better setup around Silverfield, not starting over again.

Brett McMurphy

@Brett_McMurphy

Yurachek: “The goal is to give our coaches better information, better support & a much stronger system for building & retaining talent & competing to win in the toughest conference in the country.”

On3@On3

NEW: Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek tells @Brett_McMurphy the football program isn’t where they want it and he’s "not going to make excuses for that."❌ "Coach Silverfield and I have a plan. We believe in that plan, and we are committed to doing what it takes to build a championship-caliber program at Arkansas." Story: t.co/JY0IOohctm

Those are nice words. The trouble is that Arkansas fans have heard some version of them before. Better information, better support and a stronger system for building and keeping talent is exactly what you'd expect an AD to say while the trustees are going through his department. McMurphy's point is still worth taking seriously, though. Fire the AD 3 games into a new coach's 1st season and you've got a coach with nobody above him who chose him, a donor base getting yanked in a new direction, and one more reset for a program that has had too many of them.

Board chairman Randy Lawson said the trustees are united in wanting to restore the rich tradition of Razorback football. That's the part to watch. The review is supposed to be about resources, but everybody in Arkansas understands it's also about Yurachek. If the money doesn't show up and the blowouts keep coming, backing Silverfield's plan won't be enough to save him.