Sam Pittman gives incredibly self-reflective answer to question on lessons learned as head coach

Arkansas headman Sam Pittman’s 38 years as a football coach have seen him on the sidelines all over the country, and lessons he’s learned along the way are invaluable and has made him into the coach he is today. Recently, Pittman revealed how his immense experience has allowed him to succeed to the degree he has in just three full seasons as Razorbacks head coach.

“I learned a lot, and I learn a lot. I’ve made so many mistakes. I don’t mean to, and it’s not that I haven’t thought about it and things of that nature,” Pittman said. “I think people are going to make mistakes, it’s just if they are going to learn from them. Yeah, I made a lot of mistakes and I have to get better at a lot of things.

“I will say this, I try in practice to do everything we can in practice to where if it’s in the game, we’re taking our players from ‘I hope this works’ to ‘Hey we practiced it enough, I know it’s going to work.’ So everything you do in practice, you think about Saturday and you go okay, when we’re in this situation are the kids going to hope that we can do it or are they going to know that we can do it, because we’ve got a great plan, we’ve executed it and we’ve done it at practice.”

Pittman gave examples of being unprepared for certain in-game situations and how shameful he felt for not covering all of his bases. It’s certainly a trail by fire type of job, but now, Pittman’s mentality is more along the lines of ‘if they do this, we can stop it because we practiced it,’ and is continuing to build on that mindset entering his fourth season as Arkansas head coach – the first of his career (D1) that spans five-decade, dating back to 1984.

In terms of in-game situations he enjoys – the two-minute drills were the Razorbacks’ bread and butter in 2021 and wants to continue that success heading into the new year.

“Even some of the guys on staff thought it was too much. But I wanted not only them to be prepared for that situation, I wanted to be prepared for that situation,” Pittman said. “Because at that point and time, it’s that last minute, minute and a half that’s going to decide the outcome of the ball game. So, I’m trying to get better at that.

“So everything on our piece of paper and on our board and stuff in our tape, I know. And if we can do that at practice, we’ve done a pretty good job as a coaching staff. There’s a lot of things. Everything keeps hitting, NIL and [transfer] portal and all. There’s something new all the time. And you make mistakes, and hopefully you learn from them.”