It’s back by unpopular demand! Welcome to year two of DawgSports feature on hating our upcoming opponent. Do some people dislike this piece? Yes! Do I care? No! Do I find it slightly amusing that anyone allows themselves to get worked up enough over this to send me death threats and hate mail? I do!

Before we get into the good stuff, a few announcements. Some new schools have rotated onto the schedule from the West, and we gotta take a look at why they’re loved by horrible people. To avoid repetition, I won’t be rehashing hatred for opponents that were covered last year, though I do reserve the right to find new reasons to hate Florida.

Now that that’s covered, let’s take a look at Georgia’s week one opponent... Arkansas, you’re up.

...And That’s When I Knew I Hated Arkansas

I wasn’t really taught to hate Arkansas as a young Bulldog fan. The Razorbacks didn’t join the SEC until 1992, and Georgia didn’t play them too often. Houston Dale Nutt always struck young me as a used car salesman, but that’s kinda normal for college football coaches.

My first interaction with Arkansas fans was the 2002 SEC Championship. Given that Georgia jumped on the Razorbacks early and never let up, I don’t recall any of the Arkansas faithful saying much. I did however leave that game with two impressions.

1. “Woo Pig Sooie is the longest stupidest cheer I have ever seen.”
2. “These people are morbidly obese”

Turns out I was correct, as Arkansas is one of America’s most obese states. While pathetic, I found the folks from Arkansas to be more worthy of pity than hatred.

Then they hired Bobby Petrino. Petrino’s record to that point included leaving multiple jobs without having the cojones to tell his bosses in person, interviewing for his former boss Tommy Tuberville’s job behind his back, interviewing for anyone possible open job while head coach at Louisville, parlaying that behavior into a ten year contract from Louisville, leaving for the Atlanta Falcons head coaching job the next year and then leaving for the Arkansas job 13 games into Atlanta’s 2007 season. He informed his players of his decision to take the Arkansas job via a 78-word letter.

To be clear, Bobby Petrino’s place on the spectrum of organic matter lies somewhere between pond scum and a flabby chunk of floating whale dung.

Georgia faced Petrino for the first time in 2009. The Dawgs won a shootout, but that wasn’t the case in 2010 when the Razorbacks came to Athens. The Arkansas fans who had been quiet and friendly on the way into the stadium taunted us Bulldogs on the way out.

Yes, that was somewhat worthy of hate, but what was truly shameful was that the school was so desperate for wins that they sold their soul to the devil. Petrino took Arkansas to the top ten for a brief year or two in exchange.

The reason it wasn’t more was Petrino’s decision to hire his mistress for a job in the athletic department. Petrino hit for the egomaniac with a midlife crisis cycle by buying a motorcycle he didn’t know how to drive and wrecking it with his mistress as his passenger.

The reason that Petrino was ever in the spot to hire his mistress in the first place is Arkansas’s inability to understand their true place in the SEC. This isn’t 1969 in the Big 8. Arkansas is in a state with little talent, and simply isn’t setup to be a power program.

Razorback boosters can’t accept this, and they continue to sabotage their program because of it. It started when the folks over at Arkansas fan site Hogville grew tired of Houston Nutt. Nutt had Arkansas as a 8-9 win a year team that would occasionally catch lightning and win the division. Razorback fans ran him out of town by filling FOIA’s for his phone records and generally harassing him.

They got Bret Bielema in his place. He ruined the program’s recruiting ties in Texas and elsewhere, shunning any coaches who ran the spread. You know, like 95% of the state. Chad Morris was brought into rebuild, and was starting to make some progress on the recruiting trail, but Hog fans just can’t accept how far they are from being competitive. They ran Morris out of town after two seasons.

What I really hate Arkansas for is being such a crappy dead end job that the best candidate they could find to take the job was a 58 year-old career offensive line coach by the name of Sam Pittman. Pittman collected blue-chip offensive line recruits in Athens faster than Arkansans acquire cholesterol problems. His YESSSSSIIIIIIRRRRR tweets after collecting a commitment were a source of much Bulldog joy. He was the fun uncle who slipped liquor in your drink at the Christmas party when papa Kirby’s strict eye was turned.

Now I’m forced to not only pull against Pittman on Saturday, but watch his career be torpedoed by the unrealistic idiots over at Hogville. I perused the message board to see what the Razorback faithful’s mindset is going into this week’s game against Georgia. Here’s what “The_Bionic_Pig” has to say...

“14 days ago the Georgia board was hyping J.T. Daniels as the man. As of today Sunday September 20th still hasn’t been cleared for contact now D’Wan Mathis is now being hyped because Arkansas shouldn’t present that much of a challenge next weekend because of their 2018 - 2020 win/loss record.

If Georgia is unable to run the ball at a successful clip, at least enough to keep 3rd downs respectable and everything falls on this young man’s shoulders, I’m telling anyone that will listen Arkansas can win this freaking game.”

SIR! YOU ARE A 24.5 POINT UNDERDOG PLAYING THE FIRST GAME OF A NEW COACH’S TENURE. YOUR TEAM HAS NOT WON A CONFERENCE GAME SINCE 2017.

The_Bionic_Pig was not the only one. There are actually Arkansas fans in this world who are talking about their playoff chances in the year of our lord two-thousand and twenty. Maybe y’all should just try not to embarrass the league by losing to San Jose State. Focus on becoming a quality win for the rest of us and quit dragging our strength of schedule ratings down before we throw your ass back to the Big 12 where you belong.

After all we have seen, I didn’t think anything else could possibly surprise me this year. Then I read an Arkansas message board. My God, these people are implausibly stupid.

No wonder nobody with a lick of head coaching experience wanted that job. Arkansas can’t accept the fact that they are the SEC West’s Vanderbilt, and they’re going to chew sweet Uncle Pittman up and spit him out because of it.

Now that he’s on the other sideline, I’m forced to admit that Pittman seems like the kind of guy who steals the towels and soaps from Hampton Inn. Either way, the unrealistic expectations of Arkansas fans aren’t changing, and that stunning lack of realism will have Pittman unemployed soon.

In the meantime, Razorback fans will keep calling the hogs. For their sake, I hope it never works. A large portion of the state’s population would come streaming out of a thousand different Walmarts, causing a tragic crush at Donald W Reynolds Razorback Stadium.

There’s one more thing you should know before we go. The people of Fayetteville allowed their local Waffle House to go out of business a couple years back.

...And that’s when I knew I hated Arkansas.

They can’t even get diabetes right.