Trey Biddy, who covers Arkansas for HawgSports & CBS Sports, tells McElroy & Cubelic where the biggest questions are for Arkansas & why the running game should be the focus this season
10:38 Share

It's time for Bob's Dare to Compare! You get style, you get features, you get quality and thousands of dollars in savings! Everyone's a winner when you Dare to Compare! In store at MyBob's.com

Are you tired of losing your fantasy football league year after year? Lindsay Rhodes, Emmy-winning sportscaster and football analyst, is your new secret weapon on the Believe Fantasy Football Show. Watch the quarterbacks and his ADP. I think he has massive high-end upside.

Get expert analysis on player rankings. Wide receiver 22 in fantasy Cecil Shorts. That kid can run, so I'm thinking he can have a breakout season this year. And you can too by searching the Believe Fantasy Football Show. That's B-L-E-A-V wherever you listen. This Jocks 94.5 podcast is brought to you by Millennium Satellite and Video. Log on to msbnow.com. TV excellence everywhere. That's Millennium. ♪

McElroy and Kubelik in the morning starts now. All right, welcome back in. McElroy and Kubelik in the morning, 934 a.m. Wednesday, July 31st, right here on jocks94.5.

Moving on to talk some more college football, Trey Biddy covers the Hogs, and he'll join us now on the Buyer's Right Hotline to discuss it. Before we get to Arkansas, Trey, we asked the question in our previous segment, if you were guaranteed to win and you could compete at any event in these Summer Olympics, which event would that be?

I was guaranteed to win. I could compete in any event. Maybe I would be on the basketball team. There you go. That was my choice. Yeah, that's where the spotlight is, right? Well, and then also I added to it, you probably have a max or at least close to a max NBA contract if you're on that team and good enough to be on it. So that wouldn't be bad either. Work all the way around. Yeah, that works for me. We are all very curious as to how physical –

how capable Arkansas will be running the football, especially with what we heard from Sam Pittman at SEC Media Days. What's your expectation of how that run game might look for the Hogs this fall? I think it'll be better. I mean, Bobby Petrino is going to

I mean, they're going to run the ball until they get it done. You know, he employs a lot of play-action passing. So if you can't run the ball, that doesn't work. None of the offense works. So I think they got some good pieces in place. They went to the transfer portal, got three key offensive linemen who are all starting, and Fernando Carmona out of San Jose State, who's really highly coveted.

Keyshawn Blackstock out of Michigan State and Addison Nichols at center out of Tennessee. And those guys have, I mean, really just jumped right into the starting role. You also got Talon Green back there. Talon Green can break off 70-yard touchdown runs. I mean, he's

He's a long strider. He's got really good speed. He's upwards of 21 miles per hour on the catapult at 6'6". So people take terrible angles on him because he's such a long strider. So you've got that aspect of it also. But the guy I think who will really make things churn is Jaquinden Jackson. Jaquinden Jackson is a former top 50 recruit. He originally signed with Texas at a high school as a quarterback, transferred to Utah, ran for 1,300 yards the last two years.

he's got that chip on your shoulder type of attitude, like he's got something to prove in this conference. And so, you know, 6'2", 230 pounds, he's a guy that can obviously move a pile and just really seems to have the attitude that they're looking for back there. And they've got some other good backs, too. So should be better on offense. I don't think there's any doubt that Arkansas's offense is going to be better with Bobby Petrino, and it starts on the ground. Where do you make –

I guess, where do you assess the offensive line, though? You referenced it in a couple of the additions for sure. I'm optimistic they'll be better. But in the event in which they can't run it downhill, is there enough on the perimeter to be able to create issues for the opposing defensive secondaries that they'll face on the schedule?

That's a good point. I think we're overall looking at a pretty average-ish roster as far as that goes. You know, Andrew Armstrong's the best guy that they've got at wide receiver coming back after having over 50 catches, nearly 800 yards. Last year, is he an NFL guy? Maybe on the back end, maybe a seventh-round type of guy or something. So I don't know that there's, like, an NFL wide receiver. There are teams in this conference that have a couple of NFL wide receivers that

So that's a good question. Do they have some steady guys? Sure. Do they have some game breakers? I just don't know yet. Maybe Isaiah Satania?

Has a lot of speed, has success as a return man last year. Maybe he's a guy that can help there. And, you know, for the offensive line, yes, I think it's going to be much improved over last year. You know, you could be much improved over last year's offensive line and still be really bad because they were – I mean, they gave up 49 sacks, or they played a part in giving up 49 sacks last season. And also think about how many sacks K.J. Jefferson shucked. I mean, he –

he got away from a lot of guys last year too. So is it Oklahoma or Georgia's offensive line? Absolutely not. Is it better? Yes, I think it is. And the question is, can it get it to, you know, can they, can they help them get to six, seven wins? And so that, that just kind of remains to be seen. And it's going to be interesting to see kind of how that falls together on the other side of the ball.

It feels like there are a couple of individuals that garner a lot of confidence back on this Arkansas defense, but going to need some new faces to really step up and make it go. Which of the new faces is most important to see Arkansas improve, maybe drastically on defense this fall for you?

Well, you've got Landon Jackson, obviously, who returns as an NFL guy, former, you know, he was the first team all-SEC pick last year, 6'7", 280 pounds on one side. Then there are some other intriguing guys on the defensive line. I think they've got quality depth, but, you know, what kind of role does Andrew Farrard play, who's 6'5", 382? You know, Anton Junkaj, who came in from the FCS level, had 15 sacks, was an FCS All-American player.

What kind of role can he play with the team? How is that going to translate over to the SEC? Even if he could get half as many sacks, that would be pretty solid. So I think there's some guys to look at on the defensive line. Linebacker is just such a question mark. Like you're hoping a lot at linebacker because they lost their top three tacklers at linebacker last year. So you're hoping a lot, but...

I think they're going to be good. You just don't know that they're going to be good. Xavier Ansori is a former five-star recruit who transferred in from Georgia. Brad Spence is a guy with a lot of potential. And they've got a couple other guys, Larry Wirth and Steven Dix, who had 60 tackles each at their respective schools last year to bring some experience. But to me, that's an area where you're like –

They might be good. They might not. Right. What about the secondary, though, too? I mean, like, we've kind of been all over the place. I mean, front seven, all three levels defensively are of concern for me. Yeah. I know you have a difference maker up front, which helps. But is there reason to believe that this group collectively will be significantly better than a year ago? Because they might need to be if they're going to be able to be the spoiler team that they've been in the past.

Yeah. Well, what I mean, I think you're hoping for is them to be similar to what they were last year. They were pretty average last year on defense. They let go of the rope the last couple of games. But for three quarters of the season, the defense was actually pretty solid. In fact, the past defense went from dead last 131 nationally in yards allowed to 32nd.

a pretty dramatic improvement in past defense. Obviously, there's more to it than just the secondary with that. There's the defensive line also. But that's a pretty significant amount of improvement. My thoughts are if they can play like they did the first three quarters of the season on defense, which wasn't bad. It wasn't bad. It might not have been superb, but it wasn't bad. And the offense can take a big step forward under Bobby Petrino. Then maybe they will have something. I mean, if you think about it,

If you had last year's defense and maybe the 2021 offense or 2022 offense, you know, you'd probably have a pretty solid team. It's just they couldn't seem to get those groups on the same page. But 2021, Arkansas led Power Five conferences in rushing games.

In 2022, they were second in the SEC in rushing. It was just 2023. They could not get anything going whatsoever on offense. So you got to think that Bobby Petrino is going to bring a nice boost to the offense. And that's kind of how I look at it. Like if they can just be comparable to what they were last year. Now, being comparable to what you were last year may not be good enough because I think everybody in the middle lower tier of the SEC is going to be better than they were last year.

So you might have to be better on defense just to be as good as you were last year. That's a great thought. Trey, great stuff. We appreciate the time. Before I let you run, we've talked about it. We saw where KJ was announced as a captain of Central Florida. I haven't heard your thoughts on it, but just sort of the departure of KJ Jefferson, how that went down, what was the real thought process behind it from his perspective, from the team's perspective? How did that separation ultimately end up taking place?

Yeah, well, I think for KJ, it was a pretty good opportunity. I mean, he, in my opinion, he'll probably have made more money this year than, you know, he'll, you know, make in a long time or ever has made. So I understand the move getting on the open market as a quarterback like that. You know, I think there was just a lot of division last year with, with

with the team and you know there's all kinds of rumors so I don't want to state anything as fact just about you know players not getting along and maybe jealousy over NIL deals and stuff like that which that's just going to happen when you're talking about quarterbacks but that's a lot of that's just conjecture but it did feel like the time was right to you know make a split and you know I think a lot of people really appreciate what KJ Jefferson did especially 2021 at Arkansas and just didn't go very well last year and

You kind of needed a fresh start. If you're Sam Pittman, you can't just go down the same way you went down the previous year. You've got to make some changes, and that was just part of it. Absolutely. Trey, great stuff. We appreciate the time. I look forward to catching up with you again soon. Thanks for making some time for us today.

Yep. Bye, guys. There you go. Trey Bitty joining us on the Buyer's Right Hotline. For all your insurance needs, look to Buyer's Right Insurance, a member of the WRM Group, where relationships matter. At Trey Bitty, where you can find him there. Also find his work at hogsports.com.

All right, we'll come back and finish up today's show. Give you a bad box score of the day next on Mac and Cube in the morning. Catch up with all things McElroy and Kubrick in the morning by subscribing to the podcast. Mythically, he's grown. He's almost like a little bit bigger than a player, right? Like the myth of Bo Jackson. Like, rate, and download the show from the jock app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Named one of the best personal finance podcasts, The Stacking Benjamin Show with Joe and his friends makes financial literacy fun. We see money inefficiency OG around us all the time. We've got a few skeletons sitting out in the open and maybe we need to broom them into the closet, if you know what I mean. Nope, take that out. What is...

Whatever you were going for didn't land right. Who's got a shovel and some lime? Maybe you need to do that with your financial picture. I don't know. Find out more by searching the Stacking Benjamins podcast wherever you listen.