Each week throughout football season Sporting Life Arkansas will excerpt Rex Nelson’s Weekly Picks of Arkansas College Football Games and link to Rex’s Southern Fried Blog for his full predictions. Enjoy.
Early August spoiled us, didn’t it?
The temperatures were much cooler than usual, and the humidity was down.
Then, as we knew it would, the real Arkansas summer returned.
So it is that tens of thousands of Arkansans will bake in the sun at Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium on Saturday afternoon as the Bret Bielema era opens at the University of Arkansas.
The personable Bielema has won the residents of this state over with dozens of appearances across Arkansas since the first of the year. It figures that he would connect with residents of what’s still very much a rural state. After all, this is a guy who grew up on a 2,500-hog farm in northwest Illinois. He’s a product of Prophetstown, a community of only 2,000 that was once described by a writer as “a quintessential Midwest town that every bit resembles a Norman Rockwell painting.”
Bielema, I’m told, is the most famous person to come from Prophetstown since Wabokieshiek, a half-Winnebago, half-Sauk Indian prophet.
Bielema is a man who works hard and plays hard. He was an 11-pound baby born with chicken pox and quarantined from the other babies in his first days of life. On that 80-acre farm, he learned a strong work ethic. Along with two older brothers, he helped his parents before and after school on the 80-acre farm. There were hogs to feed and pens to clean.
“Some of my buddies got to do other things more recreationally oriented, while I was busy with the pigs,” Bielema once told an interviewer. “One thing about living on a farm, you can’t miss any work. Those pigs need attention every single day. It was a lot of real hard work on all our parts, but it was rewarding.”
Yes, Arnie and Marilyn Bielema raised a youngest son who isn’t afraid of long hours.
“There was work to be done, and that’s all there was to it,” Bielema once said. “So we did it. Every day before school, I’d get up at 4:30 and do the chores, and after everything was done with school for the day, I’d come home and do the chores until night, study for a while and go to sleep before doing it again the next day.
“When I tell my players about work ethic, that’s kind of what I’m talking about, rolling your sleeves up and getting the job done when it needs to get done. That applies to living on a farm and, in a lot of ways, that applies to the football field, too.”
He would have made a good farmer. Looking at the results at Wisconsin, he’s a good football coach.
This year will be a challenge as Bielema attempts to revive a football program that must compete in the rugged Southeastern Conference. Arkansas has been to the SEC title game but has never won it in more than two decades in the league. There’s no reason to believe that first championship is going to occur anytime soon.
To hungry Razorback fans, let’s repeat what we said at the start of the Danny Ford era.
Let’s repeat what we said at the start of the Houston Dale Nutt era.
Let’s repeat what we said at the start of the Bobby Petrino era.
“Be patient.”
Let’s not repeat what we said at the start of the John L. “Smiley” Smith era, though. Those are words not to be used in polite company.
Thank goodness college football season has arrived. On to the picks for Week 1:
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