Rhett Lashlee addresses speculation linking him to Arkansas coaching job
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Sometimes it’s easy to see where a football coaching search is headed. If the New England Patriots had named anyone other than Mike Vrabel their head coach this offseason, it’d have been an incredible surprise. Right now, the same could be said about the Arkansas Razorbacks and Rhett Lashlee.
Lashlee played at Arkansas from 2002-04. He served as a graduate assistant there in 2006. He bounced through the coaching ranks for more than a decade before landing his SMU gig in 2022. Since then, he has succeeded immensely, leading the Mustangs to 11 wins each of the past 2 seasons.
Such results in Dallas of all places, where Jerry Jones can see it up close, don’t exactly quiet the noise about another move up the ladder. That said, Lashlee insists he’s not going anywhere. On Tuesday, he told On3’s Billy Embody that he’s “fully committed” to what SMU is building in the ACC.
Arkansas fans are probably disappointed to hear this, but there are still 2 months left in the college football regular season. There’s plenty of time for Jones and others to convince Lashlee to return to Fayetteville. For now, the Razorbacks will try to recapture lightning in a bottle with Bobby Petrino when they travel to Knoxville to battle Tennessee in Week 6. Kickoff for that game is 4:15 p.m. E.T. on Oct. 11 (SEC Network).
