Paul Finebaum: 'The writing's on the wall' for Sam Pittman at Arkansas

It’s all but over for Sam Pittman at Arkansas the way ESPN’s Paul Finebaum sees it. Arkansas just lost to Memphis 32-31 over the weekend to fall to 2-2 on the season.

Pittman already went into the 2025 campaign on the hot seat and it doesn’t seem like his chair is going to get any cooler. Barring a miraculous turnaround, Finebaum and others can see what’s coming in the future.

Pittman’s time in Fayetteville is short, according to the long time college football commentator. The loss to the Tigers Saturday basically summed it up.

“I think it’s pretty rough,” Finebaum said on McElroy and Cubelic. “I mean, I had somebody call me yesterday, ‘have you heard about Arkansas?; And I said, ‘No, I haven’t heard a thing.’ But you lose a game like that. I mean, the writing’s on the wall there, except you got Notre Dame this week. It’s one of the most anticipated games in modern Arkansas History. So you get through that, and you look at the schedule (and it likely won’t pan out).”

Just six days ago, Pittman claimed the 2025 Razorbacks were one of the better teams he’s had in his tenure. At 2-2, it appears that statement has backfired.

Lack of consistency has killed Arkansas this season. Pittman said it starts with him and they have to look inward to find solutions.

“The first thing you do is you look internally,” Pittman said postgame. “I look at myself, I look at the staff and what we can do better. Are we playing as well as we can with who we have and all that stuff, and the answer is no. So we have to continue to find out what our kids can do a little bit better.

“There hasn’t been any concern offensively the first three weeks, there’s some stuff we obviously have to look at after today – where we can get better offensively as well. But we haven’t played great this year yet defensively. We’ve got to figure out why. Is there something that we could do a little bit better. We thought we had it fixed today, but for them to have 500 yards on us we obviously didn’t.”

Pittman is now 32-33 at Arkansas since taking over as head coach in 2020. While there’s been three bowl game victories, Pittman has not topped nine wins in a season (2021). Since that year, he’s just 23-29.