Three bold predictions for Arkansas football’s 2024-25 season

It’s less than a week until Arkansas begins its 2024-25 season. There are multiple unknowns about this year’s team, but there’s more than enough to be excited about. To start, Bobby Petrino is back on campus. It’s been the better part of a year since he was hired, and it still doesn’t seem real.

There’s also the return of Arkansas’s rivalry with Texas. The Longhorns are a much different team than the one that showed up to Fayetteville in 2021, but the atmosphere is bound to be the best of the season. Then there’s the 12-team playoffs. If, by some miracle, the Hogs win nine games, they might earn a spot. Predicting that seems a little too optimistic, but there’s nothing wrong with making a few bold predictions.

Three bold predictions for Arkansas football’s 2024-25 season

Taylen Green finishes with 2,800-plus passing yards, 700-plus rushing yards

The best thing about having Bobby Petrino back in Fayetteville is that you know the quarterbacks will take a step up. You can see it through the work he put in at Texas A&M. In 2022, the Aggies' offense was 13th in the SEC in passing yards per game (204.2), with only 2,633 total passing yards. However, in one season with Petrino, Texas A&M jumped to third in the SEC (270.6), with 3,520 passing yards. And if Conner Weigman wouldn’t have been injured, the Aggies might have finished better than 7-6.

However, Petrino has a luxury in Arkansas’s QB that he didn’t have with the QB room at Texas A&M. He got to hand-pick Taylen Green. Green’s performance at Boise State left many Arkansas fans worried about his transition to the SEC. After losing his starting position in the fifth game of the season, Green’s numbers dipped. To be fair, the QB position was mismanaged at Boise State, and so were the first ten games, hence why Andy Avalos was let go.

Petrino saw on film what he needed in Green to pull the trigger on his offer. When talking about the importance of QB completion percentage, Petrino gave some insight on how he evaluates the position, “You can just judge a quarterback on that… Anytime I recruit somebody, I don’t really look at the completion percentage. I’m looking at how they throw the ball, how they compete, what their decision-making is, as opposed to staying away from percentages.”

He's going to mold Green into the QB he wants. And with the talent around Green, he could easily hit 2,900 yards passing and 700 more on the ground, but it depends on how well he avoids injuries. If Green makes it through all 12 games, those stats could be much higher.