Sure, football will fix it

While Rex Nelson writes columns offering meaty substance on Little Rock’s perilous flirtation with stagnation, there are those in the city — Mayor Mark Stodola and such, including Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who lives here temporarily — who seem to be saying intercollegiate football is the magic bullet.

The governor expresses great satisfaction that the 4-8 Razorbacks from Fayetteville have now agreed they will deign to play one game every other year in Little Rock’s antiquated War Memorial Stadium, now propped up as a state park, along with a practice session every other spring.

Asa acknowledges that the 4-8 Razorbacks insist in exchange on an expenditure of a significant sum of money by 2019 to make this 1950s palace less substandard. But he says taxpayers can be hit up easily enough, or, presumably, we could incur publicly underwritten debt.

Man, oh, man, these fiscal conservatives really like college football, don’t they?

If we’d throw a few more tens of thousands of poor people off Medicaid, maybe we could put a dome over War Memorial and lure a couple of 6-6 mid-major teams for a Dicamba Bowl or a Meth Bowl.

—————— Stodola chimed in the other day that he wished the governor would send state taxpayer money to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock so it could start a football team to inhabit that midtown concrete edifice and make the college more attractive to would-be students, thus boosting Little Rock altogether.

Later, when I made fun of that notion on Twitter, the mayor replied that, for Little Rock to achieve its appropriate greatness, its institution of higher learning must be transformed from commuter-college inertia to a more widely visible and vibrant presence that a football team playing in War Memorial would bestow.

At that point, some smart-aleck tweeted that UA-Fort Smith would like a state-subsidized football team, too.

All Little Rock needs, it seems by the reckoning of the mayor and others, is a raw-boned, strong-armed college-age kid quarterbacking the Trojans to greatness.

Boston was nothing before Doug Flutie. Dallas was nothing until pass-happy Chad Morris coached SMU from misery to mediocrity. If you take the Rice Owls out of Houston, you’re left with a ghost town. The Tulane Green Wave—not food, not music—is what makes New Orleans tick. There’d be no country music recorded in Nashville without the gridiron Vanderbilt Commodores. I’ve said this before and now I’ll say it again: Show me the people who do not go to UALR now but will enroll there if it has a football team. I just want to get a look at them, to try to figure out what happened to them along their way.

There’s something altogether pitiful about this.

Little Rock essentially pleads for the 4-8 Razorbacks to throw its needy self a half of a pork chop, something to gnaw on in search of a shred of meat. Little Rock essentially says Arkansas is itself still such a small and needy place that the land-grant football team can’t do as Alabama has done and abandon Birmingham or as even Mississippi has done and abandon Jackson.

And Little Rock essentially begs for public subsidies because it can’t afford to do anything on its own.

Even for all that, I can’t see a UALR football team being any good or drawing many fans. They’ve had pretty good basketball teams there — winners of games in the NCAA Tournament — that couldn’t fill their nice but relatively small on-campus playing venue.

The Razorbacks demonstrate annually that Arkansas is an infertile football recruiting base. Little Rock’s once-storied public-school football programs are storied no more, except maybe at Little Rock McClellan.

I fail to see how UALR’s losing to Delta State by 53-6 in War Memorial in front of 700 fans would lift Little Rock.

And I haven’t even mentioned the operating deficit and ensuing burden to students and taxpayers.

Presumably, UALR would attempt to play at the mid-major level in which it plays basketball, with scholarships and absurdly overpaid coaches reaping elite incomes from the head-injury risks of college-age youth.

Do we even have enough poor people to kick off Medicaid to balance those books every year?

Maybe it’s all about the gimmick. The Hogs now call their slow selves “razorfast.” UCA has a purple field.

I’m thinking UALR could market itself around the Trojan nickname. Helmets bearing prophylactic decals might attract recruits. Maybe UALR could sloganize “Trojans — safe football,” except there isn’t any such thing.

But, then, “razorfast” isn’t a real thing, either.

One other idea: UALR could hire the Pulaski Academy coach, Kevin Kelley, and save money on a punter.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansas online.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.