Hogs jump at chance to play TCU
So if Arkansas insists on going to a bowl game, 3-7 record and all, why shouldn’t it be a Southwest Conference reunion?
But with TCU, not with Texas, the trial balloon sent up before Sunday’s bowl pairings were announced.
This much is accurate: Arkansas is going back to the Texas Bowl, where it stomped Texas
31-7 in December 2014 when Bret Bielema and Charlie Strong filled in for Frank Broyles and Darrell Royal. Unlike that game, on a Monday night, this one is on New Year’s Eve with Arkansas trying to improve to 3-0 on that date.
One of Lou Holtz’ best teams, led by Gary Anderson and Billy Ray Smith, nipped Florida 28-24 in the old Bluebonnet Bowl at the Houston Astrodome on the last day of
1982. One of Houston Nutt’s maddeningly frustrating squads — good enough to beat Texas at Austin, yet lose twice at Fayetteville in October — beat Missouri 27-14 in the Independence Bowl in Shreveport, La., ringing out 2003. That one followed the Liberty Bowl, where Southern Miss, losing 17-0, might not have scored on Urban Meyer-coached Utah until the ball dropped in Times Square.
Arkansas’ bowl record, 15-24
3, indicates that the Razorbacks often have been good enough to go bowling but not consistently. A few Razorback bowl games stick out, especially 31-6 over Oklahoma ( 1978 Orange) and
27-6 over Texas (2000 Cotton). Different story with the 1966 Cotton (14-7 to LSU) and 1971 Liberty (14-13 to Tennessee) defeats.
Arkansas once played TCU in its Southwest Conference opener, going to Fort Worth in even-numbered years. Jesse Branch had a particularly deluxe game for Arkansas in 1962 at Amon Carter Stadium, the Hogs winning 42-14. On that night, Fort Worth native and TCU alum Dan Jenkins, covering the game for Sports Illustrated, is said to have pounded his hand on a table in the press box and said, “TCU will never beat Arkansas.”
An Arkansas youth of a certain age could go through college, start a family or serve a hitch in Vietnam in the 22 years that TCU went between victories over UA. The Frogs had one coach, Jim Pittman, drop dead on the sidelines. Another, F.A. Dry, beat Arkansas while coaching Tulsa, which appealed to TCU.
Arkansas’ domination of the TCU series ended one night in Fort Worth, where the wind can really howl. The Frogs came from behind for a 28-24 triumph over a Lou Holtz-coached team that had just beaten Ole Miss, something Broyles ( 0- 6 against the Rebels) could not do, and would topple No. 1 Texas 42-11 in a few weeks. Call it an only-in-2020 thing early in the Reagan years in the White House.
Your humble servant, listening on the radio, wrote in the next day’s Sentinel-Record: “People who left the game early Saturday night, perhaps fumbling for their car keys in the parking lot, missed seeing something that hadn’t happened since the days of the Edsel.”
Jack Crowe’s doomed 1990 Razorbacks, the ones he stayed behind to coach after Ken Hatfield fled for Clemson, were passed silly in a 54-26 game in Little Rock. Playing a thirdstraight game at War Memorial Stadium (can you believe that?), Arkansas was so outgunned that many wearing red in the stands left early.
That would be it for the Hogs- Frogs series until the schools met twice in the last decade. As with Texas Tech in
2014 and 2015, the Razorbacks won the road game, played first, and lost the return match in Fayetteville. A 28-7 Razorback loss to TCU before a sellout crowd at Fayetteville in 2017 was unsettling before UA athletic director Jeff Long addressed Little Rock boosters two days later. In wake of a numbing home defeat, Long
offered assurances about Bielema, his fifth-year coach, and for good measure recited graduation rates in the athletic program. No one listened, and before the year was out, both Long and Bielema were job-hunting.
Through all of that, Arkansas leads the series with TCU 44-24-2, though the Frogs, under coach Gary Patterson, have won six of the last seven against Texas, always an attention-getter. TCU brings a 6-4 record to Houston and is the favorite in Las Vegas by about a touchdown.
Arkansas’ record, 3-7 if one counts the disputed loss to Auburn and 4-6 if not, normally would be beneath the standards of a bowl team. But anything goes in 2020, a season overshadowed by COVID-19, and Arkansas can neither pass up the bowl money or the extra practices that this young team needs.
“We’ll always have folks who will say we were 3-7 and things of that nature,” said first-year coach Sam Pittman. “If you look at our schedule … we certainly played four, I think, of the top nine teams in the country and … I believe we’ve earned it. To our guys, it’s a big deal.”
So much has happened to Razorback football, mostly negative, since Bielema’s 2016 squad laid a second-half egg against Virginia Tech in the Belk Bowl. Only in 2020 could 3-7 be considered a major improvement over 2-8, UA’s record each of the last two years in the Chad Morris era.
“We’ve only got two or three kids that didn’t play in the last bowl here but they got to go on the trip,” Pittman said. “So I think it’s exciting for our players that they get a reward for at least the three wins that we had. If we had a regular season, would we have won six games? I don’t know. I’m arguing that we would have.”
And, Arkansas, which no longer plays Houston or Rice, cannot afford to miss the recruiting opportunity in south Texas. Broyles went to Houston for two difference-making players early in his Arkansas years, Ronnie Caveness and Jerry Lamb.
“You take the Hog brand down there and I think Arkansas is well received in Houston and for that matter in the state of Texas,” Pittman said. “Obviously you help yourself more in recruiting if you win the game, you know. And so certainly we’ll put all our efforts into doing that.”
“When Arkansas was part of the (SWC), it it was one of those situations where they did a lot of recruiting here and they still do,” said TCU’s Patterson. “So it’s always about recruiting.”