AUBURN, Ala. -- Tommy Tuberville entered the postgame news conference with a lost look on his face. After firing his offensive coordinator Tony Franklin on Wednesday, Tuberville had hoped the move would provide Auburn with a much-needed lift. Instead it was the Arkansas defense which appeared re-energized, dominating the Tigers from start to finish to help the Razorbacks pull off the 25-22 upset win in front of 85,782 in Jordan-Hare Stadium.

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Tuberville said, referring to Franklin’s firing. “We ran about the same thing and obviously we couldn’t make a lot of adjustments. So we stuck with what we put in Tuesday. We made a couple of changes, but it wasn’t any different.”

Actually things were different for Auburn (4-3, 2-3 in SEC) on offense. They were worse than ever before this season. Facing a Razorbacks team which had allowed 388 yards per game -- including 208 rushing yards per contest -- the Tigers hoped to take advantage of Arkansas’ weaknesses while sticking to their spread offense formula.

But on this night, it was the Razorbacks who clearly had the edge over a woeful Auburn attack.

“This is huge,” Arkansas defensive end Jake Bequette said. “On the defensive side of the ball we’ve really been improving every game and a lot of people don’t see that on the scoreboard. But we see it in the film room and in the meeting rooms, and we finally came out and pulled off a great performance. We just didn’t really let them off the hook the whole night, we got a lot of pressure and it was just a great win.”

Holding Auburn to just 21 yards through one quarter, 53 yards through one half and only 193 yards the entire game, Arkansas made sure this time that its great effort would hold up. After failing to close out strong against Florida last week the Razorbacks (3-3, 1-2) held Auburn on four downs from the 5-yard line with 1 minute, 23 seconds to play, then got a Matt Harris interception with 29 seconds remaining to preserve the win.

“We needed to have something like this happen for our kids because during the week they work extremely hard,” Arkansas defensive coordinator Willy Robinson said. “And then to finally have the ability to finish it in the fourth quarter and have success, I mean we needed to have this happen for us.”

Robinson said the focus of Arkansas’ game plan was the stop the Tigers’ running game. The plan obviously worked, with Auburn held to just 56 yards on 33 carries. And with the Razorbacks playing a near perfect game of defense, the Tigers looked more lost than ever when the ball was in their hands.

“Well when you’re about last in the league in throwing offense (like us), you put them all up there and that’s what they did,” Tuberville said. “They forced us to throw the ball and we completed 10 passes all night. And you’ve got to be able to take advantage. You’ve got to take advantage of what they give you and we just weren’t able to do it.

“(Arkansas) did a good job of playing with their weakness and adjusting it against our strength of running the ball and forcing us to throw it. And we couldn’t convert.”