Texas is fourth ranked SEC school coming into Razorback Stadium

FAYETTEVILLE — No. 3 Texas will be the fourth SEC team playing Arkansas in Razorback Stadium this season.

So far, the Razorbacks are 1-2 against the previous Top 25 teams. The Hogs beat No. 4 Tennessee 19-14 on Saturday, Oct. 5. Arkansas (5-4, 3-3) lost to No. 8 LSU 34-10 on Oct. 19. Ole Miss handed the Hogs a 63-31 defeat on Nov. 2 in the last outing before the recent bye week. Ole Miss was ranked No. 19. Sam Pittman talked about the brutal home SEC schedule.

“Well, I think the league’s really good,” Pittman said. “A lot of good teams in the league and, and the great thing this year is you’ve seen teams unranked being able to beat teams that are ranked and are ranked high, Vanderbilt’s win and certainly our win against Tennessee. People that aren’t in our league, they think, ‘Well, we can go beat so-and-so one time.’ Well, you might can, but you just said it. I mean, this is our fourth or fifth or whatever ranked team that we’ve played, or sixth or whatever it is.

“It’s a gauntlet, and you have to stay healthy and you have to play well each week, and if you don’t, as we saw two weeks ago or a week and a half ago now, if you don’t play well, you can get embarrassed, and that’s how good the league is. And so we’re in it because that’s where we want to be, and that’s where we belong. But it’s a difficult league, certainly is. For everybody. I mean, you’ve got a lot of really good teams with two losses in the league, and that says something about the SEC.”

Oklahoma State was ranked No. 16 when they Hogs faced them in Week 2 in Stillwater. The Cowboys won 39-31 in two overtimes. Arkansas also faced No. 24 Texas A&M on Saturday, Sept. 28, in AT&T Stadium. The Aggies captured that game 21-17.

Arkansas will host Louisiana Tech on Nov. 23 and then close out the regular season on Saturday, Nov. 30 at Missouri. The Hogs need one more win in the final three games to become bowl eligible. Pittman addressed this in the locker room following the one-sided loss to Ole Miss.

“I just told them that we got out-played, out-coached, out-physicaled … and that we’ve got three games left,” Pittman said. “And if we can win each one of them we can hold our head up and go on to whatever bowl. This team … I told them that we can’t have 80 that are going to go fight and 20 that don’t. I told them if we’re not willing to fight now then we won’t for the rest of our life. But if we do, we’ll fight the rest of our lives. I like this team. I hate that we got beat. I hate it for the university. I hate it for the state. But I do like this team. I know I’m gonna catch Hell for that, but I do. I like the kids. I think they’ll come back and fight and correct a lot of things that were wrong today, if we physically can do that, which we can. And come back and give a good showing when we go out there and play Texas the next time that we’re out there.”

Arkansas and Texas will kickoff at 11 a.m. on Saturday and televised on ABC.