I think that's perfectly reasonable.
If I had watched what we did with Perkins last year, and seen that we had backs behind him that were not true freshmen, I would have assumed that the backs behind him were not that good, and there wouldn't be a reason to expect a huge jump that would make them better than Perkins. Had Shump gotten more carries, maybe you say a true freshman that is a decent #2 will likely be pretty good as a true sophomore, but anybody not a die hard state fan (and not an arkansas fan) doesn't have much reason to think we have good options behind Perk.
Knowing how little even the media people focused on college football know about it, I'm not surprised at all that they have us that low.