Arkansas players and fans celebrate with the Boot trophy after the Razorbacks stunned LSU with a 17-0 victory last Saturday at home in Fayetteville. It was the first win in 18 SEC games for Arkansas.Arkansas had to end its streak at some point. The Razorbacks went ahead and did it emphatically.
Having lost 17 consecutive Southeastern Conference games entering last Saturday night at Reynolds Razorback Stadium, Arkansas blanked No. 17 LSU 17-0 to improve to 5-5 overall and 1-5 in league play. The Tigers were coming off a heartbreaking loss to Alabama in overtime the previous week in Baton Rouge, but the Razorbacks were the last team in the SEC from which to expect sympathy.
"If you build things on a solid enough foundation, you don't waver and you don't flinch," Arkansas second-year coach Bret Bielema said in his news conference after the win. "The great thing about our guys is that we've been through so much that nothing is going to faze them. There is nothing they haven't been through."
There had been no denying the improvement of the Razorbacks even before last Saturday's kickoff, but the players had little to show for it. Arkansas lost 35-28 to Texas A&M in overtime in September after leading 28-14 in the fourth quarter and fell 14-13 to Alabama in October and 17-10 at Mississippi State earlier this month after jumping out to a 10-0 lead.
Now Arkansas not only has a triumph over LSU but the "Golden Boot" trophy that accompanies it, and that will be on display in Fayetteville for the first time since the Tigers won the first of three straight meetings in 2011.
"If I could pick one game to win all season and lose all of the others, it would be this one," Razorbacks senior offensive lineman Brey Cook said. "It was so much fun for us, and it was a blast to go out there and take that thing."
Despite 33-degree temperatures at kickoff and a sub-freezing wind chill, Saturday night's game drew an announced crowd of 70,165 at the 72,000-seat facility. A good chunk of Arkansas fans found their way on the field afterward to celebrate the first SEC win by the Razorbacks since a 2012 topping of Kentucky.
"I don't know how a coach can be 0-17 and get the support that we did," Bielema said, "but I think it's because we did things the right way. It was a fun thing to share with the fan base."
Bielema was not an 0-17 coach this time last week, but he did leave a Wisconsin program he had guided to three consecutive Rose Bowls for an SEC team that had begun tasting defeat with regularity in the rugged Western Division. He would lose his first 13 league games, with 11 of those setbacks occurring to ranked teams, including seven that were lodged in the top 10.
Arkansas had been ranked in 2010 and '11, when Bobby Petrino's dazzling offenses resulted in trips to the Sugar and Cotton bowls. Petrino, however, was fired in the spring of 2012 for lying to athletic director Jeff Long about an extramarital affair and was replaced in an interim role by John L. Smith, who was entertaining to the media but provided just a 4-8 season.
The Razorbacks lost their final four SEC games under Smith and went 0-8 last year, when every other West member went to a bowl game and Auburn played for the national championship. Arkansas opened this season at Auburn and played the Tigers to a 21-21 deadlock at halftime before the Tigers broke free, and all eight SEC opponents for the Razorbacks this season have won at least seven games.
Arkansas, which is led for a second straight season by the tailback tandem of junior Jonathan Williams (932 yards and 6.0 yards per carry) and sophomore Alex Collins (886 and 5.9), needs a split these next two weeks against No. 8 Ole Miss and No. 19 Missouri to attain bowl eligibility. It will not be easy for Bielema's Razorbacks, but what has to this point?
"They are a very good football team," LSU coach Les Miles said, "and I don't see them lacking in any of the phases. They are really talented, and I think Coach Bielema has done a strong job in preparing them. It really speaks to the Western Division, because play after play and game after game, the teams you are playing are really good."
Said Bielema: "We can play with anybody in the country, and that's the 100 percent truth, but the challenge in today's SEC West is incredible."
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.