THE RAZORBACKS ARE ON THE RISE.
I
mprobably, against the backdrop of a global pandemic, Arkansas athletics stands out now for all the right reasons. For as challenging as the human experience may have been from March 2020 forward, that same period has been uniquely great for Hog fans. Coaching chicanery dominated the “twenty-teen” years, and it’s not without irony that as I write this, a cover piece I wrote in 2012 for the Arkansas Times sits nearby in one of my countless stacks of household debris. That year was noteworthy for arguably being the most tumultuous year in a Razorback football program/soap opera that’s historically replete with oddities and frustrations. Bobby Petrino began that season as the toast of the state, a Cotton Bowl-winning offensive guru that seemed to be, at long last, “the guy.” By year’s end, UA Athletic Director Jeff Long had summoned Bret Bielema from Wisconsin to excise the taste of a John L. Smith interim year. Petrino’s disgrace and exile was old, upsetting news by the time December hit, and Smith’s 4-8 debacle was lowlighted by a loss to LouisianaMonroe in Little Rock that will, sadly, forever be the first 22 JUNE 2022
ARKANSAS TIMES
Hog game my oldest son attended. This publication chose Long, somewhat controversially, as the “Arkansan of the Year” for 2012 after he spent most of it in the limelight, for better or worse. Long’s tenure bottomed out badly five years later and Bielema’s paralleled it as he never gained traction or sustained the momentum he briefly had. An unqualified stand-in for Long then made an even worse hire, and oh, by the way, the baseball team gave away its best shot at a national championship in the summer of 2018. Mike Anderson followed one of his only good basketball teams with a pedestrian 18-16 bunch that fall, and then Chad Morris followed his clunker of a debut football season with an even worse second one, and… Ugh. My apologies for the hard digression there. But it’s an inescapable fact that empty seats in a beautifully renovated stadium or a proclaimed basketball “palace” were already a thing before COVID-19 vacated them out of public caution. By the time I turned off Morris’ last loss, a pitiful drubbing by Western Effing Kentucky, I wondered in November 2019 if I’d ever really be much of a Hog fan
BRIAN CHILSON
BY BEAU WILCOX
