Eric Schlegel / DMN
Arkansas coach Ken Hatfield (left) offers congratulations to Tennessee coach Johnny Majors.Arkansas a Cotton flub again
Tennessee guesses right to reach goal on fourth-down stand
1/2/1990
Doug Mathews needed a vote of confidence, and he got it.
By midway through the fourth quarter of the 54th Mobil Cotton Bowl on Monday, he had watched Arkansas run through his Tennessee defense 67 times for 338 yards. They had offered, at best, some grudging resistance to the Razorbacks' running game. Consequently, when the Razorbacks needed a little more than a yard on fourth down at the Tennessee nine, Mathews was pretty sure how they might try to get it.
Fullback up the middle, he figured. So Mathews, the Volunteers' defensive coordinator, called for a goal-line defense, a great defense against the run ...
But a bad defense against the pass. He turned to his boss, Johnny Majors, and decided to cover himself.
"If they throw the ball," Mathews told Majors on the sideline, "we're in trouble."
Majors' gaze didn't leave the field.
"Don't worry about the pass," he said.
Mathews made the right call.
Arkansas didn't.
Tennessee linebacker Kacy Rodgers stepped into the gap and stopped fullback Barry Foster a foot short of the first down – the first time in four tries the Razorbacks didn't convert a fourth-down attempt – and the Volunteers' 31-21 lead was secure.
The play became particularly poignant when the Razorbacks closed Tennessee's lead to 31-27 with 1:25 left on a 67-yard touchdown pass from Quinn Grovey to tight end Billy Winston.
But it was too late by then. The game, by most considerations, was over when Arkansas failed at the Tennessee nine with 8:29 left, the third time the Razorbacks had failed to score from inside the 10.
The fourth-down miss may have been the most costly. And Jack Crowe, the Razorbacks' offensive coordinator, saw the play unraveling even before the snap.
Crowe had put in a new blocking scheme for the Cotton Bowl, and it had worked well. But when Mathews sent in 5-11, 270-pound Martin Williams as an extra lineman on the last fourth-down play, Crowe knew the inside veer fullback handoff was doomed.
Crowe knew that even if his linemen executed each block properly, there still would be one man free. That man, he knew, would be the linebacker, Rodgers. The best Crowe could have hoped, he said, was that Grovey would recognize the change in Tennessee's defense and call a timeout.
Grovey didn't.
"It was my fault," he said.
Crowe said he didn't expect Grovey to attempt an audible because of the offense's relative inexperience with the new blocking scheme. But the timeout would have given the Razorbacks time to set up something else.
But Grovey didn't, and Foster had nowhere to go when he hit the line. He was lucky to make it as far as he did, although he disputed the spot of the ball by the official. Grovey said an official told him that had Foster turned the ball upfield instead of lying it sideways, he might have made the first down.
But Rodgers didn't make it look that close on his one-man tackle.
"He's a real strong runner," Rodgers said of Foster, who had 103 yards on 22 attempts. "He's hard to bring down. But I thought I had him."
Foster never noticed the change in Tennessee's defense and acted as if he didn't care that they did.
"They weren't stopping our option at all," he said.
The Volunteers were aware of their run-stopping deficiencies. They were not used to the size and power of Arkansas' running backs and had not played an option team this year.
Mark Moore, a Tennessee defensive tackle, said the call for a goal-line defense likely saved them.
"That was really smart," he said. "If we had been in our basic defense, the fullback probably would have slid through and gotten the first down."
And with a first down, the entire game might have changed, Mathews said.
He wasn't sure the Volunteers could stop Arkansas from scoring again. He hinted that the Razorbacks likely would have scored eventually had they gotten the first down.
"I'd say the odds were in their favor," he said, smiling.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]