On the surface, Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman and Memphis football coach Ryan Silverfield don’t seem to have all that much in common.
Pittman is a 63-year-old from rural Oklahoma with enough folksy southern charm to run a fried chicken empire, while Silverfield is a Florida boy almost two decades younger. When it comes to their coaching paths, however, they have some striking similarities.
The Head Hog served as an offensive line coach at 10 different FBS schools before landing the top job at Arkansas. Many considered his hire as a massive gamble on someone who had never been a coordinator or called a play before.
Silverfield, meanwhile, cut his teeth at a variety of low-tier analyst and assistant positions at the high school, college and NFL level. After starting his coaching career at the turn of the century, Silverfield finally landed his first FBS job as a position coach in charge of the Memphis offensive line. He added the title of run game coordinator in 2017, associate head coach in 2019 and rose to his current position after Mike Norvell left for Florida State.
The same doubts surrounding Pittman’s hire applied to Silverfield, who’d never called plays or served as an offensive coordinator. How would he fare taking the reins at Memphis, a solid Group of Five program that established itself as a serious contender in the American Conference?
After following up an 8-3 COVID season with back-to-back 6-6 regular seasons, Silverfield’s Tigers have found their stride. Memphis has reached the double-digit win mark in consecutive seasons, and after a 3-0 start this fall, it has won 25 of its last 30 games. Last year, the Tigers were ranked No. 24 in the final AP Poll. This season, they are considered one of the top contenders vying for the Group of Five’s guaranteed College Football Playoff slot.
With Arkansas being the only Power Four team on Memphis’ 2025 schedule, one could argue that Saturday’s clash in the Liberty Bowl is the biggest game of the year for the Tigers. For the Razorbacks, too, it comes across as a must-win contest coming off a tough road loss to Mississippi and looking down the barrel at an extremely challenging schedule ahead.
They may not show it in the heat of the moment on Saturday, but Pittman and Silverfield have developed a solid relationship for two coaches who have never faced each other before. O-line coaches gotta stick together, right?
Sam Pittman and Ryan Silverfield’s Relationship
The pair have met on multiple occasions thanks to the good hospitality Arkansas has received at the Liberty Bowl in both 2022 and 2024. Both times, Silverfield went out of his way to accommodate the Razorbacks. The University of Memphis is in charge of the facilities that visiting teams use when they come to the Home of the Blues for postseason play.
In December 2022, Silverfield made sure to open the facilities despite snowy weather so the Hogs could get extra practice reps in.
“Silverfield has done an excellent job, and he’s a good guy, too,” Pittman said at Wednesday’s SEC teleconference. Last December, he even offered to open the facility on Christmas morning in case the Hogs needed some particularly hardcore additional practice. “I said, ‘Ah, hell no, we’re not gonna do that,” Pittman recalled on his Wednesday night radio show. “Christmas is Christmas. But he’s that kind of guy.”
Silverfield, in this way, deserves at least a sliver of credit for Arkansas defeating Kansas and Texas Tech in both of those Liberty Bowl appearances.
Judging by his recent comments toward another SEC head coach, however, Silverfield doesn’t hand out these pleasantries to just anybody. On his weekly radio show, the Memphis coach took an unprompted shot at Pittman’s former boss, Kirby Smart, over Georgia football’s epidemic of reckless driving incidents.
“Generally, on a Sunday afternoon when we meet with the team, we do two things. We always start out with ‘not our standard,’ always start out with a negative,” Silverfield said. “What’s not our standard is, ‘Georgia football player arrested for driving 900 miles per hour over the speed limit.’ That’s a weekly occurrence, so that’s one we’ll show.”
Thank goodness the Hogs are flying to Memphis.
Stakes and History of Arkansas vs Memphis
The Razorbacks actually lost their first three Liberty Bowl appearances, all against SEC opponents in 1971, 1984 and 1987. The 21st century has been much kinder to Arkansas’ adventures in Memphis, though, with Liberty Bowl triumphs in 2010 and 2016 prior to Pittman’s tenure.
This will also be the two programs’ first matchup since the turn of the millennium. Memphis actually leads the all-time head-to-head series against Arkansas by a tally of 3-2. The Tigers won three straight matchups from 1992-94, but the Hogs got revenge in 1995 and 1998. None of the previous contests have been decided by more than 16 points.
Plenty has changed in the 27 years since that last meeting, of course. Pittman was coaching the o-line at Oklahoma at the time, while an 18-year-old Silverfield was a baby-faced freshman at Hampden-Sydney College.
Now, they’ll face off in a stadium familiar to both teams with a lot more on the line than your usual non-conference matchup. Pittman owns one of the 10 hottest seats in America, and desperately needs a convincing win to keep the train on the tracks after another close loss to open SEC play.
Silverfield, meanwhile, is sitting pretty amongst the Tigers. He received a lucrative contract extension in December, and is being mentioned as a candidate for Power Four jobs like Virginia Tech in the upcoming coaching carousel. The 45-year-old will be just as hungry – if not more – for a statement win over an SEC team to bolster his squad’s (not to mention his own) resume.
Sam Pittman Previews Arkansas vs Memphis
Here are some more tidbits from Pittman’s weekly radio show at Catfish Hole:
- On Memphis’ unique pass rush: “The biggest thing they do is they put your [running] back in protection. You’re not positive which five or six guys are coming…we obviously watched enough tape where we have a feeling on it…Get a one-on-one matchup with your running back and they’re probably as good as anybody…our running backs have had extra work in individual this week in pass protection, but you’ll see ’em as you watch the game.”
- On defensive communication issues last week: “We really weren’t getting the calls in fast enough Saturday and we were trying to change them, and our kids were basically playing ball not using all the tips and reminders that they had. So the bottom line is we simplified it. We let them have an opportunity to line up, see things and then let their mind go back to what matters…We’ve got good athletes on defense, we fell like we’ve got good cocahes on defense, but we’ve got to let them play. We’ve got to turn them loose, and I didn’t feel like we did that in the first half.”
- On pregame preparation and speeches: “At some point you have to empower your coordinators, and they’re the ones that see the kids more than I do, to be perfectly honest with you…I talk to them Friday night briefly before we eat, then I talk to them Saturday before we eat. Then I talk to them going out, but the coordinators are the ones that really do the talking before the game. I’m more of a ‘rah-rah, this is what we have to do’ type deal.”
- On Arkansas’ tight end room: “That’s a special group. They all can block and they all can catch…[Jaden] Platt’s probably been as consistent as any of them. We wanted him extremely bad. He could have went to basically any school that he wanted to in the country, but he chose us and I’m hoping that he’s happy here. We usually don’t ask disgruntled guys to come to the Catfish Hole [laughs], but he’s done a fantastic job.”
- On practice this week: “Tuesdays are the hardest practices. It was 90 [degrees] and I didn’t think we finished quite like we should have. We had a conversation [Wednesday] as a team and had a great practice. We changed it up a little bit to get more energy and enthusiasm…the kids really responded and I feel like we’re ready and we’ll have a really good game over there.”
- On handling last week’s loss: “Obviously, if you don’t have as many points as your opponent at the end of the game, adversity hits and you’ve got to block out the negative noise. You have to learn from it…I think everybody in here thought we were going to win as much as we did at the end of the game. It just didn’t happen, but you’ve got to move on and because we’ve had really good leadership within the program, we ended up having a really good week so far.”
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