Arkansas fans' full-on revolt over Ryan Silverfield makes rest of the SEC look tame

While the entire college football world spent its Sunday fixated on just how ugly things would get between Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss before he hopped on a plane to LSU. Sure, Ole Miss just lost its coach to a bitter rival in the middle of a College Football Playoff run. But Arkansas just went 2-10, and their AD responded with a hire so uninspiring that it had fans literally storming the athletic complex in protest.

This is a conference that's no stranger to popular uprisings; look no further than what erupted in Knoxville when Tennessee tried to hire Greg Schiano a few years back. But the Razorbacks took things to another level after their school announced the hiring of Memphis head coach Ryan Silverfield. And the worst part? They kind of have a point.

Arkansas fans are already trying to run Ryan Silverfield out of town

As the Kiffin saga kept dropping haymakers on Sunday morning, the runners-up for his services were quick to pounce on the other top candidates in this cycle. Florida pivoted to Tulane coach Jon Sumrall. Auburn snatched up South Florida's Alex Golesh. How would Arkansas respond? With an AAC coach of their own ... whose team is currently sitting in seventh place in that conference.

As soon as word broke, Razorbacks fans went berserk, both on social media and message boards. AD Hunter Yurachek — already public enemy No. 1 thanks to how badly his two previous hires went, Chad Morris and Sam Pittman, panned out — committed the cardinal sin of misreading the room, and got flamed in the replies because of it.

From there, everyone smelled blood in the water. It didn't matter what personal testimonials Silverfield got from former players and media members who'd covered him. It didn't matter that he posted a 12-second video greeting Arkansas fans and saying how excited he was to get started on the job. He was the exact wrong man at the exact wrong time, an uninspiring hire for a fan base that had already been driven to the edge.

The introductory post on X was a bloodbath.

Not even a photo of Silverfield signing his contract was safe.

And this was much more than just some keyboard warriors being contrarian. A group of dozens of fans gathered outside the Arkansas athletic complex, sporting everything from protest signs to paper bags over their heads. Yes, seriously:

None of this is Silverfield's fault, necessarily. He is by all accounts a stand-up guy who's had some success over six years at Memphis, and you can't fault him for taking a promotion he was offered in good faith. But this is the SEC we're talking about; fairness has nothing to do with it, and from afar this sure seems like Yurachek making the same sort of limp mistake that has allowed his program to fall all the way to the bottom of the conference.

It's hard to feel great about Silverfield's odds of success in the SEC

On first blush, Silverfield has the outline of a solid hire. Memphis is in Arkansas' geographic region, so you know he's familiar with the high-school scene and knows how to recruit. He's won double-digit games twice in six years, and has never had a losing season. He's even 4-0 in bowl games, if you're into that sort of thing.

The problem is when you take even a cursory look under the hood. Sure, Silverfield's tenure at Memphis wasn't bad, but when you compare it to what predecessors Justin Fuente and Mike Norvell accomplished in the six previous seasons — three straight conference title game appearances, three double-digit win seasons — it sure seems more like treading water than raising the bar.

Silverfield inherited an easier AAC post-conference realignment, and has still lost multiple conference games in each year without appearing in a single conference championship game (or even finishing better than third in the league). He's just 12-20 against teams above .500 at the time of the game, and 3-12 against such teams on the road. There's a reason plenty of Memphis fans are not so quietly relieved that Arkansas took him off their hands.

That's never what you want to hear when you're an SEC team hoping to hire from the lower ranks of FBS. Silverfield hasn't even proven that he's a great Group of 5 coach, and now he has to try and turn around the most dire situation in the toughest conference in the country. We don't blame Razorbacks fans for getting out the paper bags.