Arkansas high schools not giving Hogs good reason to invest in local recruitment

Quick, name a football player who became a household hame while in college who played high school football in Arkansas since 2016.

For those who took a second to think on it, the list is Treylon Burks and that's it. There are only a handful of guys listed as Top 10 in-state recruits who even received respectable college playing time over that period, much less sustained success.

Arkansas is where other SEC and Big XII coaches come to fill out the back end of their rosters, but mostly just want to get under the skin of Razorbacks fans while causing problems for whomever the Hogs coach happens to be.

The truth of the matter is Arkansas produces a high number of quality college athletes, it's just not in football. Instead, they're making noise in basketball, baseball and track.

That's why it's a little perplexing to see Razorbacks fans get so upset because they think the Hogs aren't spending enough time and resources picking over the local talent.

They get all flustered because this guy or that guy got away only to never be heard from again because of lack of success. Yet, fans want coaches packed into tiny press boxes across the state watching to see if there might be one semi-worthy player on the field.

Of course, that shows a lack of understanding as to how recruiting works these days and also how precious recruiting dollars happen to be. Instead of wandering out into the darkness of a Friday night on the word of a high school coach who thinks he has a player who may have something or based off whatever grainy game tape that showed up in the mail, coaches now have access to HD video on pretty much any player in the country via Hudl.

That makes it super easy to sift through whatever little talent happens to be in the handful of players in Arkansas on a given year.

If you take every school in 7A plus the top four biggest schools in 6A, you still can't come up with as many combined students as there are in the conference in which Arkansas commit Bryce Gilmore of Prosper, Texas plays. That means the 20 biggest schools in Arkansas have to put together 20 rosters of 22 starters with fewer students to choose from than a single conference in North Texas.

Cabot, the state's largest school, has nine coaches working with its football players specifically on the sport. Meanwhile, a single team in Gilmore's conference has 27 coaches who aren't classified as strength coaches or trainers.

To put that in perspective, the coaches in that conference are putting together their starting line-ups from the equivalent of every 2A-4A school in Arkansas, plus another 14 schools from 5A. That's 134 schools combining to produce the same talent pool as a single conference in Texas.

What that means is Sam Pittman can send a coach to a single game between a pair of Collin County 6A schools in North Texas and see more Division I talent in two hours than if he sent all of his coaches across the entire state of Arkansas for the entire season.

It's nothing personal. It's just math.

Picking the 22 best to put on the field out of 7,000 students for a school like Allen High School makes the odds much higher that the player at each position is dramatically better than an athlete starting at Benton High School, the largest 6A school in Arkansas at 1,300 students.

There's also the math of money. Schools like Allen, Prosper and McKinney play in $60-$70 million stadiums with workout facilities and offseason programs that are packed with not so voluntary "voluntary workouts" that match the investment. That's not to mention that many starters in the area get to spend summers working out with college and NFL athletes as they flock to the county for many of the respected offseason workout programs there.

To be perfectly honest, it's not fair. It's why an Arkansas kid like Brandon Burlsworth or Grant Morgan can come in and grow so much.

They had that in them the whole time. They just didn't have access to what's needed to bring it out in high school like the vast majority of Texas high school players get.

However, at the same time, a school of 4,000+ in Texas plays basketball in a gym that often looks like something a Class A school would be ashamed of in Arkansas, so there are trade-offs.

The main point is this: Until the state of Arkansas starts giving Razorbacks coaches reasons to invest recruiting resources into local athletes in football, fans need to chill out. Pittman, nor any other coach, can afford to miss out on two or three college ready athletes chasing one somewhere in Arkansas who will have to transfer out to a lower level school in two years.

It just doesn't make sense. The math says no.

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