Arkansas’ ‘gruesome’ fall camp prepared them for season

Arkansas’ ‘gruesome’ fall camp prepared them for season

Visit our homepage for more preseason camp coverage and the best deal on the market! All new members get 75% off your first year. That means for just $30 ($2.49/month) you get a complete year’s access to the top Razorback coverage including transfer portal intel, scoops from The Trough premium message board, plus all of the latest from On3’s top national analysts. Don’t miss out, sign up today! FAYETTEVILLE — Walk outside anywhere around northwest Arkansas, and it’s hard to deny the heat. Temperatures have been in the triple digits regularly with little rain and cloud cover to provide relief over the last few weeks. The Arkansas football team felt that the most when they were in fall camp. There was no indoor practicing, the players were out on the fields, one grass and one turf, living in the heat nearly every day since August 5. “Camp has been gruesome,” Arkansas JACK Steven Soles Jr. said Tuesday. “But I think we make it gruesome, so the season is easy. It’s been fun though. We’re having fun.” Mental toughness throughout fall camp is what players have cited is the biggest part of playing in the heat. Last year, the team split time between inside the Walker Pavilion and outside on the practice fields. The practices were also in the mornings, as opposed to the afternoon in the heat of the day when the Hogs practiced this year. The fall preseason practices is where defensive back Carter Stoutmire felt he made the most progress. “I think I took a really big jump from spring,” Stoutmire said. “Ball personally, being able to just settle down in the defense. I feel like I’m a lot more comfortable now with my position in the room that I’m at now compared to where I was in the spring. “I feel like I’m playing a lot faster and just making a lot more plays. So I feel like this will be a really good year for me personally and also for the team.” Arkansas starting prep for opponents The fall camp portion of the preseason technically ended after the first scrimmage on Aug. 16 after school started. Now, the preparation for opponents begins, and in a way, things start to get easier for the players. “Now it’s like you really start to prepare for an opponent,” Stoutmire said. “I wouldn’t say the excitement goes away during camp, it’s I’d say more so the monotony of just going against each other every day with no one else to play except you. So now, I feel like the excitement starts to come back around and stuff, knowing that you have an opponent coming up that you’re preparing for.” Arkansas still has to beat North Alabama in Week 1, but a major test looms in Week 2 on the road against Utah. On top of the elevation change of playing in Salt Lake City and a Utah team that is nationally ranked and more-than-likely will be when the Hogs come to town, the game has a later start time. Locally, the Hogs will be playing at 8:15 p.m. MT. To help simulate that later kickoff, head coach Ryan Silverfield opted for his team’s second scrimmage of the preseason to be a 9:15 p.m. CT kickoff. “We had a scrimmage underneath the lights with a 9:15 kickoff, kind of to give us an opportunity to simulate what it’d be like, one, playing a night game at Utah, but two, just getting underneath the lights,” Silverfield said Sunday. “I think you don’t want to ever go through training camp, regardless of your early schedule, without getting underneath the lights, new lights. Just the opportunity to catch ball, see it, work different things, the different situations where the shadows, all the different things you need to.” That scrimmage is where KJ Jackson separated himself to be named the starting quarterback over AJ Hill, who he’d been battling with for the spot since spring ball. “He always is out screaming and yelling, not crazily…but he’s Quarterback 1 for a reason,” Soles said. “I would say he’s not just waiting for the rep to start. He can control the offense. I can say that, as a defensive player, I can tell he’s that he’s poised. He’s snapping at guys, telling guys to go here, go there, go there, talking to the running back at the same time type stuff. I would just say you can tell he’s very confident in what he has put out his game to be, and it’s paid off.”

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