TEXAS – ARKANSAS: A LONG AGO, PRESENT AND FUTURE RIVALRY

THE HISTORY OF THE TEXAS VS. ARKANSAS SERIES- (IT IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK)

Larry BeSaw once interviewed DKR for a profile. He asked him what he was thinking when UT fell behind 14-0 to Arkansas in the 1969 game. “I thought we were going to tote home a whipped ass,” he replied.

 Arkansas and Texas had some great games in the series, but as a competitor to Texas, the record reflects no rivalry. In fact, Rice beat Texas more times than Arkansas did. Texas record is 52 wins and 18 losses against Arkansas. Perhaps that is the reason Arkansas fans hate Texas more than Texas fans hate Arkansas.

Arkansas fans say the losses accumulated due to either better Texas teams or Arkansas finding a way to lose. Arkansas coach Broyles knows why. In football, psychology is just as crucial in winning as schemes and strategies, and psychologically Texas had Arkansas number.

An Arkansas head coach in 1989 said that the week before the Texas game, the Razorback’s personality changed, resulting in the team playing tentatively against Texas. The coach said, “It was like we were walking in sand.

Texas and Arkansas football series were close in the ’60s, but overall the series was never close. The Razorbacks were unable to win at the most painful moments. A 15-14 victory settled the national championship in favor of the Longhorns in 1969.

 TEXAS – ARKANSAS:

A LONG AGO, PRESENT AND FUTURE RIVALRY

by Larry Carlson ( lc13@txstate.edu )

In post-game remarks the last time Texas and Arkansas squared off on the ol’ gridiron, jowly Bret Bielema, then the Boss Hog, got a little bit graphic about his team’s 31-7 trouncing of a Texas squad that had just become UT’s first bowl team ever to finish with a losing (6-7) season.

Bielema described the gratification from what the game delivered as “borderline erotic.”

Arkansas had limited an anemic Texas offense to only 59 yards in total offense and could well afford to take a “pity knee” on the Texas two yard-line to finish off the 2014 Texas Bowl. It was the Hogs’ highlight of a decade.

But ask a Longhorn fan on the sunny side of fifty about a Texas-Arkansas football rivalry and you’ll likely get a quizzical look. What rivalry?

Post that same question about Longhorns and Razorbacks to many Hog fans from nine to ninety-nine and you’ll get a different response. Maybe a history lesson about how the Porkers beat Texas in their last Southwest Conference matchup, thirty years ago this fall. About how Arkansas has won four of the last six meetings, including a Cotton Bowl thrashing to toast the new millennium and the sexy Houston setting that so stirred Bielema almost seven years ago.

Blake Puryear, a 2012 Arkansas graduate, says Hog fans are excited about the approaching game with Texas and the prospects for rekindling the rivalry. Puryear, who lives in Bentonville and works in eCommerce Software management, told me he feels Arkansas-Texas runs deeper than what he called “forced rivalries” born with SEC foes after the Razorbacks left the SWC thirty years ago.

Like many UA alums, Puryear was raised by parents who are Arkansas grads. He was schooled as a youngster about the intensity of the once heated rivalry. “There’s old, bad blood passed along for generations,” he said. But Puryear also noted one change that he believes has “softened the hate a little.”

“A good quarter of my classmates were from Texas,” Puryear noted. “That makes things a little better. Not much, but a little.”

There won’t be quite as much at stake this month as when Texas journeyed to Fayetteville in December ’69 for the Big Shootout to determine the national championship. The Horns and Hogs, ranked first and second in the polls, played before a crowd of 44-thousand chilly fans — including President Richard Nixon and his secret service entourage — all somehow wedged into smallish Razorback Stadium. Texas, of course, rallied from two touchdowns down at the start of the fourth quarter to win an epic 15-14 fight.

Texas will certainly have more fans on hand for the 2021 version of the rivalry. But so will Arkansas. Thanks to many renovations and expansions, the home now known as Donald W Reynolds Razorback Stadium seats more than 76,000.

The Arkansas fans attending and letting out spine-tingling “Wooooo, pig soooey” cries will be even more fevered than usual but Longhorn fans and players can be glad the game will be on campus instead of in Little Rock.

Back in the heyday of the rivalry, Arkansas rotated its home games against Texas, playing once every four years in the state capital because of what was then a larger stadium there, and also playing on campus every fourth season. In the case of Arkansas football, atmospherically at least, it was truly a tale of two cities. Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium didn’t just seat more people. It seemed to attract a, shall we say, wilder breed of Hogs who had likely never visited the charming campus of the state’s flagship university..

Former Longhorn Jay Arnold (1971-73) recently recalled his visit to Little Rock as a sophomore defensive end in October ’71. “After about two minutes on the sidelines, Coach Royal made everybody put on their helmets with orders not to take them off at any time during the game.”

It wasn’t so much a hard rain that pelted the white-clad visitors on an overcast afternoon, it was a hail of emptied Jim Beam pint bottles and whole oranges. Those were traditional and essential missiles in the creative arsenals of a good number of Hog fans back then.

It was a lost weekend for the Longhorns. Arkansas fans played their role in what would become a big win over Texas but turned out to be the Porkers’ lone victory over UT in a 12-year span.

“We stayed at a hotel with gravel landscaping,” Arnold says. “They threw gravel at the windows and called the hogs all night long.”

Arnold was responsible for perhaps the only Texas highlight that day, becoming the first player to block a field goal attempted by Arkansas’s All-America kicker, Bill McClard. As the Horns headed to their locker room, beaten hard for what would be their single SWC loss in a stretch of six years (following the season opening loss to Texas Tech in ’68, the Horns’ ’71 loss to UA was the only one until 1974). they were still bombarded with more than words from fiery fans. Arnold laughs a little these days when he recalls warily spotting an Arkansas player sprinting toward him after the game. Thinking it was one more blow on the way in a day filled with them, Arnold buckled his chinstrap and girded himself. But it was McClard, congratulating him on the textbook blocking of his first-quarter field goal try.

It should be mentioned that UT still got the last laugh in ’71. Texas re-grouped, got key players back from injuries and won their remaining five conference games. Arkansas, unbeaten in SWC play, would stumble two weeks later and lose to a bad Texas A&M team, then get tied a week later by a Rice squad that had won only two games. The Longhorns claimed the SWC title by a half-game and earned their fourth consecutive trip to the Cotton Bowl Classic.

Two seasons later, Jay Arnold would return to Arkansas as a converted defensive back who would become an All-SWC pick. The Steers mauled the Hogs, 34-6, in Fayetteville and it wasn’t just the game’s outcome that strikes Arnold differently.

“On the bus ride in, you could tell we were in a great college town. Beautiful campus, hilly area and great fall football weather,” is how the retired attorney remembers the Ozark setting.

“I can say it’s viewed as the biggest game in a decade (in Arkansas),” an old buddy of mine, an Arkansas sportscaster, tells me. “It will be rowdy and crazy but nothing the Horns don’t face weekly. Arkansas fans of today don’t really remember why they hate Texas.”

But that can’t be true. Can it? So I check in with my good friend, Morris, an amigo since third grade and a UA grad, Fayetteville area resident and long-time Hogs season ticket holder. He’s playing nice when I ask him about the hatred Arkansas fans have for anything having to do with Texas. As a guy who lived in Texas until he was 17, he said he could never be a hater of his old state and has even toned down his distaste for the burnt orange, claiming that’s the case with most Arkansas fans.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s a big game. And it’s been passed down from fathers,” he says. “But (the hatred) has died down because we don’t play Texas every year,” he reasons, and launches on really hating the Aggies. “The way they act…all their stupid traditions…I can’t stand ’em,” he concludes.

Then Morris shifts into telling me about catching 44 Rainbow trout down below the dam on the White River the other day. Everybody knows that, especially for hunting and fishing, Arkansas truly is The Land of Opportunity.

But you can’t sandbag me, Morris. I’ve known you too long for that.

I know which big fish you really want to land right now. And it ain’t trout.

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