The best indicator of progress Chad Morris could have had in his first season in Fayetteville would be to lead Arkansas to a bowl game. After losing 34-27 on the road against a bad Colorado State team over the weekend, the prospects of making it to the postseason in 2018 now look bleaker than ever for Morris’ program.

If you missed the game, the Razorbacks were in control from Fort Collins, up 27-9 in the second half, only to have the Rams score 25 unanswered to steal one in front of a home crowd that may have had more Arkansas fans in attendance than Colorado State supporters. For whatever reason, the Razorbacks went away from the run game and called a very conservative game down the stretch and it ended up biting them on the road.

During his weekly Monday morning appearance on Birmingham-based radio program WJOX The Roundtable, SEC Network host Paul Finebaum offered up these thoughts on the terrible loss by Arkansas. Finebaum even went so far as to call it the worst loss of the season to date for the SEC.

“We were all doing the blackboards before the year, and that’s a game that you said, ‘They have to go out there and win the game.’ I think they have Tulsa, which looks easier than Colorado State,” Finebaum said on the air.

“Their conference schedule is not impossible, but to get to a bowl game — which is what this year was about, and they had to win that game. Suddenly, you go from a situation to where people are going, ‘Chad Morris, man. He’s crazy. He’s got a lot of energy’ to ‘How did they become the worst team in the league?’ That’s how quickly a game like that will do you in. It happened to Missouri a couple years ago when they lost to Purdue.

“It’s a really bad loss — probably the worst loss we’ve seen this year in the SEC.”

Fortunately for the Razorbacks, the team does not play a Power 5 non-conference opponent due to Michigan dropping the scheduled home-and-home series late in the process. With non-conference opponents North Texas and Tulsa still on the schedule, those two games now become must-win situations if the Razorbacks are going to become a bowl team this season.

The conference slate also isn’t bad, all things considered, with the Razorbacks getting Ole Miss in Little Rock and Vanderbilt in Fayetteville in late October. However, the loss to CSU makes all those games do-or-die and Arkansas will still need to upset another conference team to reach six wins in 2018.