Pittman Says He Was Misled into Suffering Pain All Last Season

For all the talk about what will be better for the Arkansas football team in the upcoming season, the one thing that gets most overlooked is head coach Sam Pittman no longer contending with a hip problem.

There’s a lot of talk about Taylen Green being in his second year of the Bobby Petrino system as a quarterback and a great deal of hype surrounding what is expected to be an improved offensive line. However, as anyone who has ever dealt with prolonged chronic pain can attest, having Pittman no longer suffering extreme pain at all times may be the biggest impact of the season.

No matter how good someone is at their job, when high levels of constant chronic pain kick in, it’s hard to make even basic decisions or communicate effectively because the brain is split between focusing on the pain while warning the body of perceived danger and trying to think at a high level to make important choices regarding those under a coach’s charge. It’s borderline impossible to perform at full capacity.

In an interview that posted earlier this week with “The Coaches and the Mouth” podcast, Pittman indicated he would have made a different decision in regard to toughing it out had he known what he knows now. Unfortunately for him and his team, it appears he wasn’t working with fully accurate information.

According to PIttman, there were no warning signs. It didn’t hurt at first.

Just one day near the end of June, it simply gave out, or as Pittman put it, “it just broke one day.” SEC Media Days were coming up, so he decided to hold off until afterward to see the doctors to help plan a course of action going into the season.

“I get it checked and they say you need new hip,” Pittman said. “But then a new hip to me sounded like you’re not going to get it fixed, you know, you get it fixed, and you’re going to miss this part of practice, this, this, this, but then we can medicate it, and it’ll be fine and all that. And really that they lied to me, and so it just got sore, worse, worse, worse, worse.”

The bad advice and lack of clarity on how quickly Pittman could have been back on his feet left him feeling like he had only one choice. He would have to tough it out for the sake of the team and his staff.

“I think if somebody gets hurt, they just don’t know when they can be back, you know,” Pittman said. “And that was my problem.”

Once he finally got the hip replacement done after hobbling around in severe pain all season, he was stunned at how easy the process went and how quickly he was able to get back on his feet coaching without the distraction of pain.

“I’ll say this, it’s not worth the five months of pain because you can’t ever get off a hip,” Pittman said. “You can’t sleep off of it. You can’t set off of it. You can’t walk off of it. It’s different than even when I had my knee totally redone. It’s just more. There’s more pain involved, but after after surgery, piece of cake. And, man, it feels great now.”

Pittman had his surgery done on the Tuesday of national signing day and by noon the next day he was in the office, albeit on a walker, working his way through officially welcoming new high school recruits and handling everything that comes with the first day of the transfer portal opening.

“The key is there’s really no rehab,” Pittman said. “In other words, they want you to walk, and once you can walk, that is your rehab. So I was at work the next day and continued to do that.”

By the time the Liberty Bowl game against Texas Tech rolled around, he had graduated to a cane, making life much more manageable.

“I had just started using a cane about four, four days before that, so my biggest concern was getting the hell out of the way,” Pittman said. “You know I’ve never said, ‘Get back! get back!’ so many times.”

Still, even though things were much better, there were concerns about whether he could withstand an entire game. Once it was over, there wasn’t enough left in the tank for celebrations or the customary handshake.

“I just didn’t know how long I could stand up,” Pittman said. “And certainly, at the end of the game, [Texas Tech coach Joey McGuire] was gracious enough to run across the field to shake my hand, and then I looked for the nearest warm bench to set on while they were doing the celebrations and all that.”

Now Pittman begins spring practices next week in a much better place than he was for all of last season. His mind will be fully focused on his players and the important decisions he will have to make along the way rather than splitting between high stress calls and the extreme pain that reguarly broke his concentration.

For Razorbacks fans, it may well be the defining difference in a couple of games against one of America’s toughest schedules. That’s a whole different source of pain for Pittman this year.