Rex Nelson: Arkansas College Football Picks Week 4

Each week throughout football season Sporting Life Arkansas excerpts Rex Nelson’s Weekly Arkansas College Football Picks and link to Rex’s Southern Fried Blog for his full predictions. Rex makes his prediction on every four-year college football team in the state. Enjoy.

The running game was the focus last Saturday in Fayetteville. It was unlike anything in recent Arkansas Razorback history.

Once more, both Jonathan Williams and Alex Collins topped the 100-yard mark. We’re getting used to this, aren’t we?

Collins is the first freshman in Southeastern Conference history to top the 100-yard mark in each of his first three games. He’s the first freshman at any FBS school to do it since Oklahoma’s Adrian Peterson in 2004. That’s not bad company.

Arkansas threw just 11 passes for 69 yards, the fewest passes thrown by an Arkansas team since the Houston Nutt era.

Seeing that the Golden Eagles have now lost 15 consecutive game — the longest FBS losing streak — this obviously wasn’t a good Southern Mississippi team. USM is now 34-107-3 through the years against teams that are now members of the SEC. But in this era of high-scoring college football games, it’s impressive anytime you can hold an opponent without a touchdown. USM was just four of 15 on third down and ran only four offensive plays in the fourth quarter. So hats off to the Hog defense.

Now, on to saying something that sounds very strange to me: “The Razorbacks play in New Jersey on Saturday.”

New Jersey?

OK, we’ll hold off on the Jersey jokes. No references to the mob, chemical plants, landfills (no doubt with Jimmy Hoffa’s body in one of them), traffic-choked turnpikes and people who use Bo Pelini’s favorite word a lot. We won’t even reference the cast of Jersey Shore.

There’s a football game to be played.

We were 8-2 on the picks last week (we had picked UCA to win by one point and the Bears lost by one point; we also had not predicted that UAM would end its 11-game losing streak), making the record 18-4 for the year.

On to the Arkansas College Football Picks Week 4: