Rhett Lashlee is back in the middle of Arkansas football conversation, and once again it has nothing to do with him taking over in Fayetteville.
The SMU head coach recently took aim at the idea that Arkansas owns the toughest schedule in the country this season, saying on the Andy & Ari On3 podcast:
"No offense to Arkansas, they can't have the hardest strength of schedule in America to start the season because no one's played a game. We don't even know who's good, so we don't know what a good and an easy schedule is right now."
That comment landed exactly the way you’d expect with Razorback fans. Lashlee may have been talking about the logic behind early strength-of-schedule rankings, but Arkansas is the kind of program that hears that kind of remark and files it away fast.
The reason is simple: the Hogs have spent years grinding through one of the most punishing slates in the SEC, and this season is no different. ESPN's Football Power Index currently has Arkansas' 2026 schedule ranked as the toughest in college football. So when Lashlee used Arkansas as the example in a debate about scheduling, it naturally struck a nerve.
His history with the program only sharpens that reaction. Lashlee was a record-setting quarterback at Shiloh Christian and once walked on at Arkansas, but his time on the field in Fayetteville was brief. He spent his Arkansas playing career stuck behind Matt Jones, attempted just one pass, and it fell incomplete.
Lashlee later came back to the program in 2006 as a graduate assistant, joining Gus Malzahn as Arkansas finished 10-4 and won the SEC West. That season was also tangled up in the Houston Nutt-Malzahn-Springdale Five saga, and it ended Lashlee’s only coaching stop in Fayetteville after one year.
From there, he followed Malzahn to Auburn, where the Tigers went 4-1 against Arkansas while Lashlee was on staff.
There have been other close calls with the Razorbacks, too. In 2019, he was reportedly a leading candidate to become Sam Pittman's first offensive coordinator, but Arkansas went with Kendal Briles instead. Then in 2025, after his work as Miami's OC and SMU's head coach made him one of the most talked-about names to potentially replace Sam Pittman, Lashlee pushed back on that speculation before signing a lucrative extension with SMU.
So the latest comments do more than poke at a schedule ranking. They add another layer to a long, messy Arkansas-Lashlee relationship that already had plenty of history.
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