Chad Morris’ first season at Arkansas started smoothly enough.
Arkansas blows 18-point second-half lead, loses to 0-2 Mountain West team
The Chad Morris era has its first blemish: a 34-27 loss to Colorado State.
Isaiah J. Downing-USA TODAY Sports
The Hogs made casual work of FCS Eastern Illinois in Week 1 and headed into their Week 2 game against Colorado State as 14-point favorites.
Things were going pretty well for a while in Fort Collins. The Hogs gave up an early field goal and didn’t score at all until the game was 13 minutes old, but they were up 13-3 by midway through the second quarter. The team they were playing, CSU, had looked bad in losses to Hawaii and Colorado. This was going to be a cruise.
Even after a couple of CSU field goals in the second quarter made the game 13-9 at halftime, Arkansas seemed fine. Two touchdowns in the first eight minutes of the third quarter made it 27-9, and Morris’ bunch was going to cruise with leisure.
Arkansas did not, in fact, cruise to a victory.
Arkansas gave up 25 unanswered points after that. The Hogs were out-gained 195 yards to 16 in the fourth quarter, during which time they got two first downs. And the Rams just kept piling up touchdowns, until Izzy Matthews plunged in to win it with eight seconds left:
The Razorbacks gave a lateral play a decent college try after that, but that didn’t go anywhere, and Mike Bobo’s squad got its first win at Morris’ team’s expense.
Colorado State thus pulled ahead of the Hogs in the SEC standings. The Rams play Florida next week and have a solid chance of moving to 2-0 in the league.
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