If Anybody Set Precedent for Potential Kane Archer Return to Arkansas, It’s His New Coach

To be clear, this is a day of celebration for Greenwood High quarterback Kane Archer. 

One of the most celebrated prep quarterbacks in the history of the state has had plenty on his plate over this last season, not least of which was grappling with the death of one of his beloved teammates while preparing for a Friday night game.

As a state, Arkansas isn’t exactly pumping out elite football players left and right, so any time a native earns a full scholarship to a major conference program, it’s a big deal. In the months leading up Archer’s Tuesday announcement of becoming the latest UCF football commit, he fell in love with the Orlando program and his potential for growth there.

“UCF has the most complete campus I’ve been to,” Archer told UCFSports’ Brandon Helwig. “I really like UCF a lot.”

That’s not an insult to the other schools who had made Archer’s top seven: Appalachian State, Louisville, Missouri, Ole Miss, SMU and of course Arkansas. That’s just a testament to how much love he felt from the Golden Knights. He is, after all, the first class of 2026 quarterback on board there. 

Still, among certain Arkansas football fans, a sense of loss lingers. Of what could have been. 

Archer had been offered by Razorbacks in eighth grade and for many years, fans dreamed about what he could do on the Hill if given the chance one day. 

He has certainly delivered on the field. Greenwood carries a 26-game win streak into the 2025 season, and Archer will be looking to lead the school to its third straight state title. Last year, he was named the 2024 Gatorade Player of the Year in Arkansas after throwing for 3,880 yards, 57 touchdowns and only two interceptions while adding 795 yards and 10 touchdowns on the ground. Archer broke a national record, too, by completing a sensational 81.5% of his passes.

While Greenwood’s finest likely won’t be following in the footsteps of Tyler Wilson as a freshman, that doesn’t mean the dream of Kane Archer as a Razorback is dead. Given the transfer portal, things can certainly change in the coming years. Home will always be the Natural State for the talented 17-year-old. 

More and more, Arkansas fans lament the loss of an in-state high school talent only to see him boomerang back a year or two (or three) later. 

Here’s just a sampling of some of them:

Courtney Crutchfield (Missouri to Arkansas)

Markell Utsey (Missouri to Arkansas)

Luke Jones (Notre Dame to Arkansas)

Broderick Green (USC to Arkansas)

Anthony Switzer (began career at A-State, then followed Blake Anderson to Utah State, then came to Arkansas last year)

It’s even happened with two former Hog quarterbacks: the late Ryan Mallett and Jacolby Criswell, who has since committed the rare double boomerang, bouncing back between Arkansas and North Carolina on two separate occasions.

If any former quarterback knows that you can always return from where you came from, it’s UCF football coach Scott Frost.

Frost, the master of not burning bridges, has pulled a boomerang twice over the course of the last few decades. 

Like Archer, he grew up in a one-program state bleeding red. Except for Frost, it was spending his childhood in Wood River, Nebraska, which is just farther from Lincoln than Greenwood is from Fayetteville. He fell in love with the Nebraska football program. “I basically grew up on this campus when my mom was a track and field coach here and I was running around, getting into trouble and getting run over on the Devaney Center track,” Frost said in 2020.

The 50-year-old Frost, like Archer, chose to leave the state coming out of high school, however. At that point, the legendary Tom Osborne hadn’t yet won any national titles and Frost wanted to learn under Stanford coach Bill Walsh, one of the game’s greatest minds and architect of the west coach offense which fueled the San Francisco 49ers’ NFL dynasty in the 1980s.

Instead of getting turned into the next Joe Montana upon his arrival in Palo Alto, Frost started logging snaps at safety. So he packed up his bags after two seasons and transferred back home to play for Nebraska, where he led the Cornhuskers to a share of the national championship as a senior.

Scott Frost, Kane Archer Share a Lot

Frost and Archer both know what it’s like to have your beloved home state program sour on you to an extent, too.

Frost, now in his second stint as UCF football head coach, coached the Golden Knights to a 13-0 season and a national championship according to only two sources of note – the school itself and the Colley Matrix.

He parlayed that into a yet another return to Lincoln, but things didn’t go as planned with the native son in charge. Instead, in three seasons, Frost suffered a 5–22 record in games decided by eight points or less, and an 0–14 record against ranked opponents before getting the axe three games into his fifth year. 

He returned to Orlando in December, to take over for Gus Malzahn, another Arkansas native. 

The UCF program hasn’t had the greatest of luck with imports from this state – as you can see in the below shots at Malzahn, KJ Jefferson and Terry Mohajir, the former A-State athletic director – but the hope is fourth time’s a charm.

Certainly, Archer has also gone through some humbling experiences. Despite his elite performances, the standout quarterback has continued to drop in the national recruiting rankings. Once considered a high four-star prospect by multiple services, Archer is now a consensus three-star and is not nationally ranked by any outlet. He likely didn’t hear from Bobby Petrino as much as he would have liked since the Hogs’ OC instead went with class of 2026 quarterback Jayvon Gilmore.

Gilmore is 6-foot-6 and Petrino likes those taller quarterbacks. Archer is listed at 6’1” but may be a bit shorter than that. Once it became clear that Archer wasn’t Arkansas’ priority any more, a few fans cooled on the former golden child too.

For now, Archer doesn’t have to worry about any of that. He can get on with the business at hand of having an all-time senior season. That must be a relief.

Frost didn’t return to Orlando to take over at UCF until December, but it only took a few months for him to make a deep impression on Archer. 

“Coach Frost is one of the realest people I’ve ever met,” Archer told UCFSports.com. “He’s very straightforward and will tell you the truth whether you like it or not.”

Maybe, one day in the far future, that will entail a conversation that ultimately leads to Archer returning home. Frost would definitely be a coach who could empathize on that front.

But Frost knows something else: how it feels to have a renowned offensive genius cool on you. For him, that was Bill Walsh. For Archer, it’s Bobby Petrino. 

The disappointment which led to Frost to leave Stanford opened the door to a college career that became the envy of most every other quarterback. Time will tell if Archer leaving his home state leads to the same.

“I want to be labeled as the greatest to ever come out of Arkansas,” he told the Hawg Talk Podcast. “I’m going to keep working until I get there. I don’t care what it takes.”

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Archer’s View on NIL Aligns with Pittman

During that interview with the Hawg Talk Podcast, Kane Archer gave an answer to a particular question on NIL in college football that seemed to perfectly align with the philosophy of Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman.

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See Archer’s full interview here:

Michael Main contributed to this story.

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