Smash That “Follow” Button
FAYETTEVILLE — If anyone has a pretty clear idea about the situation new Arkansas football coach Ryan Silverfield has walked into, it’s former Razorback boss Houston Dale Nutt.
Nutt, a Little Rock native and former Razorback player, took over in 1998 for Danny Ford, who was let go after consecutive 4-7 campaigns.
A similar challenge awaits Silverfield, who left a successful six-year run in Memphis (50-25) on Nov. 30 to take over an Arkansas program that lost its final 10 games last season.
Silverfield beat both No. 18 South Florida and Arkansas in 2025.
“I’ve never had a chance to meet (Silverfield) and my impression has been from the outside looking in,” Nutt told Best of Arkansas Sports. “The job that he did at Memphis has just been outstanding.”
More important than Xs and Os, Silverfield is tasked with erasing what he described as a “loser mentality” that has plagued Arkansas football for the better part of 14 years.
Of course, bringing in talented players helps as well. On that front, he’s successfully landed four of the state’s top six prospects who were originally headed out of state on his first full day in Fayetteville.
Nutt is impressed that the new Head Hog didn’t just provide lip service to that part of the job.
“Of course, we always tried to build that wall in the state of Arkansas,” Nutt said. “I know it’s much different now with NIL and this craziness. I don’t know how you do it, man.”
Nutt shuddered at the thought of fending off suitors trying to poach his three-headed backfield monster of Darren McFadden, Felix Jones and Peyton Hillis, all who went on to play in the NFL.
Silverfield made retention a priority by securing key pieces like Quincy Rhodes Jr., Braylen Russell and KJ Jackson. He’s also brought in 41 players from the portal, the nation’s ninth-best transfer haul, per On3. The 45-year-old wants to win, and win quickly.
Nutt, whose 75 wins are second in school history behind Frank Broyles (144), returned to Fayetteville in 1998 similarly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. But his excitement was quickly doused with some cold-water realism from longtime head athletic trainer Dean Weber.
Houston, We Have a Problem
“I was so excited. My dream job, coming back home,” Nutt said. “I will never forget after my first team meeting going into Weber’s office and (former assistant) Louis Campbell was in there and I said, ‘Hey guys, I know I’m just a small-time head coach, been at Murray State and Boise State, but what am I missing?’”
Nutt saw talented players all around the locker room like Brandon Burlsworth, Grant Garrett, Bobby Williams, Russ Brown, Madre Hill, Clint Stoerner and Anthony Lucas.
“Looking at all these guys, what am I missing?” Nutt wondered. “They look great.”
“Dean Weber says, without flinching, ‘You got to realize you’re in the SEC,’” Nutt recalled. “‘You played in the Southwest Conference. This is the SEC, and these guys haven’t won.’”
These Hogs had won a combined eight games over the last two seasons. Yet they roared to an improbable 8-0 start in Nutt’s inaugural campaign. A generational motivator and a players’ coach to the bone, Nutt had to do some extensive surgical work on the Arkansas locker room.
“I started to figure out that these guys were good, tough guys, but they didn’t truly believe and they really weren’t together when I came in that first team meeting,” he said.
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Nutt noticed that the white and black players mostly sat in different parts of the locker room. After practice was over, almost everybody went straight to their cars and went home – no socializing or locker room banter after a hard day’s work.
So he hatched a plan.
“I told all my coaches, let’s get ’em all, everybody get ’em to your house and get ’em to my house and we’d eat and start doing a few more things together,” he said. “They didn’t know how to take me. At first they thought, well, he’s just kind of a ‘rah-rah’ guy, and they didn’t think it was going to be for real.”
As he put it on 103.7 The Buzz’s Morning Mayhem this week, “players don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
A Tough Nutt to Crack
Nutt had a breakthrough late in the summer on Dedication Night, an event where coaches and players reveal who they’re playing for in the upcoming season.
Nutt and all of his assistants put their hands on a helmet to symbolize they were all in, which later became a motto used by both Dabo Swinney and Ryan Silverfield.
“When we got to the players, something happened that I didn’t expect,” Nutt added. “Some of the players got up there – I won’t mention their names – and said, ‘Hey, listen, I don’t have a family. Dad’s in prison, didn’t know him. Mom’s been on drugs. And listen, I ain’t got one family, this family, and I’ll die for y’all, man.’
“All of a sudden these tears start coming down and the next guy starts saying, Guys, I’ll do anything for y’all. I just want to win.’ Man after man gets up there.”
Razorback walk-on turned All-American offensive lineman Brandon Burlworth, later the subject of the movie Greater, capped off the night.
“Burlsworth got up,” Nutt recalled, “and he said, ‘Guys, I don’t have but three months with you all and that’s it. And I want to do all I can. I’m going to be committed to this Razorback program. I want to win.’ Just something that was pretty concise, and he went and sat down.”
The meeting was more effective than Nutt could have even imagined, as his conversation with Marvin Caston afterward revealed.
“We are together,” Caston declared. “We’ve never been together. We’re together. We can beat Green Bay tonight. We can beat the Packers.”
The fullback went on to become a prominent member of the Razorback Foundation. Nutt appreciated the sentiment, but wasn’t worried about taking down the Super Bowl runner-ups at that time. Instead, the focus was on Southwestern Louisiana in the season opener.
Rallying the State of Arkansas
Still, he knew something special was happening at that point.
“We just became one,” Nutt said, “and I felt like the entire state was with us in a foxhole.”
The newly-connected Razorbacks fired off eight straight wins to start the season, with six of those coming by two scores or more.
Silverfield has a similar challenge ahead, and Nutt certainly thinks he has his priorities straight.
That 1998 team soared into the top 10 of the AP Poll at one point. Silverfield hasn’t yet been able to show his work on the field, but he has brought the Razorbacks into a different top 10 – the transfer portal rankings.
Now, the new Head Hog will have to spend the rest of this year getting his team and the state as a whole into the foxhole alongside him.
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A native of Newport, where he was an all-state football and basketball player, Dudley Dawson has spent more than four decades inside or around Arkansas athletics. He served as a student assistant for Eddie Sutton and graduate assistant for Nolan Richardson before embarking on his journalism career. His notable stops along the way have been with the Northwest Arkansas Times, Hawgs Illustrated and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, not to mention various sports talk radio programs. Currently, Dawson wears many hats. In addition to contributing at Best of Arkansas Sports, he also covers Arkansas baseball and softball for Hogville and high school football for Fearless Friday, works as a senior analyst for KNWA and KARK’s Pig Trail Nation, and hosts the Inside Arkansas recruiting podcast.
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