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Arkansas coach called an old friend and mentor when Hogs were down
After Arkansas lost for a third consecutive time early in the season, Razorbacks coach Bret Bielema was down and needed to hear from a familiar voice.
That familiar voice? Kansas State coach Bill Snyder. Now the two coaches, whose roots both started with Hayden Frye -- Snyder as an assistant and Bielema as a player, then a coach -- will face off in the Liberty Bowl with the Razorbacks taking on Snyder's Kansas State Wildcats.
Then it was Snyder who hired a young Bielema to be an assistant at Kansas State.
"I just asked about, you know, when he hadn’t won one in a while, how he would turn the corner,” Bielema recalled of that September conversation during a Liberty Bowl press conference. “I’m always leaning on him for stuff like that.
"Obviously, it’s some stuff I leaned on and took some notes and it worked.”
The Razorbacks got hot after that conversation, winning six of their last eight games, and earning a berth in the Jan. 2 game in Memphis.
“I don’t want this to be about me and Coach Snyder by any means,” Bielema said. “I want the bowl game to be about our players and our fans, but for me it’s just going to be really cool ... to be around him. There’s so many people I’m close with on their staff. It will be really, really unique.”
The friendship was strained a bit when Bielema left after two years to become the defensive coordinator at Wisconsin under Barry Alvarez. The job came with the potential of eventually replacing Alvarez.
"I was not enamored by it when that happened,” Snyder said, “but by the same token, it turned out to be a good move. That was part of the package, so to speak, that there was that opportunity for him when Barry stepped down for him to step into that role.”
