HOOVER, Ala. — Arkansas hopes for a major breakthrough in 2015.

Perhaps the team can win 10 games, hang around the SEC West race for most of the season and finish well inside the Top 25.

It’s not a preposterous thought. Even more difficult to imagine in hindsight, the Razorbacks could’ve finished the 2014 regular season as a 10-2 team. Instead, Arkansas finished 0-4 in one-possession games, mustering a 6-6 mark overall.

RELATED: The case for Arkansas to win the SEC West

Since the program hired coach Bret Bielema, the team is 0-7 in one-possession games.

When you plan to win almost exclusively with defense and a strong running game, blowouts against Top 25 foes are going to be rare. In other words, in a loaded SEC West, Arkansas is going nowhere unless the team corrects that problem.

“We have to learn how to close out games when we’re up or when we’re close,” Brandon Allen said. “It’s all about closing games off. We were not able to do that last year and we’ve made a big emphasis on it this year.”

Part of the issue is that Arkansas’ offense isn’t made to hurry downfield through the air, and when the team trails in the fourth quarter, it has to transform into something unfamiliar. Something that isn’t suited to the team’s personnel. As a result, the pass offense has been terrible late in close games under Bielema. (I’ve written about this extensively already.)

At SEC Media Days, the head Hog offered his own three-pronged reasoning for the team’s poor outcomes in close games, which I’ll paraphrase here:

  • Depth. At Wisconsin, Bielema beat plenty of Big Ten opponents without rotating anyone on or off the field along the line of scrimmage on offense or defense. “Use of your depth in the third and fourth quarter is paramount in this league,” Bielema said. But when he arrived at Arkansas, the team’s depth on both lines wasn’t sufficient to make the transition in strategy.
  • Execution. In all phases of the game, including special teams and defense, Arkansas didn’t make the plays in those seven close games. More specifically, though, the team’s personnel and playbook weren’t well-situated to handle late-game situations on offense. Bielema alluded to the hiring of coordinator Dan Enos and some adjustments in the passing game as potential positive adjustments.
  • Confidence. Arkansas entered the fourth quarter with a 13-7 lead on then-No. 7 Alabama. The Tide believed it would win, as it so often has. The Razorbacks? After losing 14 consecutive SEC games at that point, can you blame the Hogs for doubting it could knock off the eventual conference champions?

That last one, it seems, is what Arkansas believes will make the difference in 2015.

“Think about all the things that you ever did for the first time in your life. Some were probably easy, but other things weren’t,” Bielema said last week, drawing some giggles from reporters. “To go into a hostile environment and win in front of 115,000 people when there’s two minutes left on the clock is a very difficult thing to do.”

Bielema oozed confidence at Media Days — in his players, in his schemes and in the program. It worked to end what became a 17-game conference losing streak in resounding fashion.

“For some reason we just didn’t know what to do in the fourth quarter,” Keon Hatcher said. “‘Coach B’ just kept telling us, he was like, ‘We’re close to a breakthrough. We’re almost there.’ We believed in him. We kept going to work each and every week as if we were going to win the next game.”

If the team can win potentially-close games against Texas A&M (Sept. 26) and at Tennessee (Oct. 3), it’s conceivable Arkansas could be 5-0 by the time it gets a rematch with Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Perhaps by then the Razorbacks will carry a burgeoning confidence in close-game scenarios.

Allen insisted last week that Arkansas could beat any team in the country. There’s no talent gap, he said, citing last year’s 14-13 loss. I don’t know him personally, but his body language and tone sounded like a guy still trying to convince a part of himself of the truth to that statement.

Find a way to beat an Alabama on the road in 2015 and Bielema could have every player on the roster convinced that even an SEC title is possible for this program.

If the team’s struggles in close games subsist, though, Arkansas could have trouble scrapping out of the bottom spot in the SEC West standings.

Finding a way to win one-possession games is more important than any other facet of the ’15 Arkansas Razorbacks.