Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

9/12/2010 at 10:05am

Image by Mark Wagner

Arkansas quarterback Ryan Mallett threw for 400 yards and 3 touchdowns against Louisiana-Monroe.

LITTLE ROCK — Twice Ryan Mallett was sacked. Louisiana-Monroe sent him to the ground even more often and forced him into a first half fumble.

Arkansas receivers dropped passes. Add the drops to the pressure the Warhawks were bringing — Coach Bobby Petrino called it a “blitz-a-thon”, Mallett got flummoxed and began overthrowing receivers.

Saturday shaped up to be an awful night for Mallett and No. 14 Arkansas, right?

Hardly. It just took time for things to materialize.

Yes, the Heisman hopeful struggled at times, as did the rest of the Razorbacks’ offensive players, but in the end they did more than enough to dispatch ULM 31-7.

Mallett completed 65-percent (28 of 43) of his passes. He threw for 400 yards and three touchdowns, while being intercepted once. Arkansas scored 24 points in the second half as Mallett completed 16 of 20 passes (80-percent) after halftime.

And in the process, Petrino hopes Mallett and the offense learned a valuable lesson. Points are going to come, even if they don’t come right away.

“Offensively, sometimes you have to wear them out,” Petrino said. “I get the feeling sometimes with our offense that they think they can just go out and everything good is going to happen right away. You just have to wear them out.”

Petrino might have been talking to himself as well. He admitted to being hard-headed about trying to run the ball into the heart of a ULM defense sold out to stopping the run.

Similar admissions have been made by Petrino before and for whatever reason he continued to as his running backs to pound away inside against a defense with eight in the box. What the limited amount of running room did, though, was offer the Razorbacks one-on-one matchups with defensive backs.

And we know how that tends to work out for defenses.

Once Mallett settled down, he began finding the open man. Quite often that open man was Greg Childs, who caught 12 passes for 146 yards and a pair of touchdowns.

Mallett looked up at the 7-0 halftime score and couldn’t believe what he saw.

“That’s not how we play ball. We talked about that,” said Mallett, who started slowed but ended up with third 400-yard game of his career. (Georgia, a 51-42 loss, and Troy, a 56-20 win were the other 400-plus yard games.)

While it took time for the offense to settle in, the defense held firm. ULM was allowed only 188 yards and didn’t score until the fourth quarter, meaning the Razorbacks went seven quarters into the season before giving up a touchdown.

That gave the offense time to figured things out.

With the defense proving capable — at least against lower-tiered opponents — of doing its part, that should help the offense not feel so pressured to make plays. Mallett struggled with that last year, looking for the big play when it seemed like nothing else was there.

Halftime seemed to change the mindset of the quarterback and the team. Instead of buckling under the pressure — blitzes from ULM and the self-imposed variety — the Razorbacks showed fight.

Arkansas could have played better than it did against ULM and in the first quarter of the opener against Tennessee Tech. The Razorbacks will have to play better with games coming up against Georgia and Alabama, but offense coordinator Garrick McGee was encouraged.

“We’re going to be a good offense,” McGee said. “I do think our kids at some point, they think they can just walk out there and make things happen because of all the talk, because of all the good players. The bottom line is – I’m glad we got serious. I’m not glad we didn’t play well, but I’m glad we did get pushed to the point where they had to look each other in the eye and decide if we’re going to move the ball or not. And they did.”

Tagged: Louisiana-Monroe War Hawks, Ryan Mallett, Arkansas Razorbacks