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Front row for the anti-hog Saturday, Nov 19, 2005 By John Brummett This will be my first Razorback game since, well, it's been so long I'll have to look it up. Jack Crowe was coach, not having yet lost to that intramural squad from some military academy. It was against Ole Miss - my last game, I mean. Frank White, the late great, invited me. Arkansas lost, of course. A running back out of Pennsylvania named Dickerson, as I recall, made a valiant dive for the end zone at the end, but came up short. The Hogs' punter was awful. He'd shank another one and some guy a few rows down would lament, "The (bleep) can't kick. The (bleep) can't kick." OK. I looked it up. This was September 1990. The Hogs lost, 21-13, en route to a 3-8 season in which they tended to give up 40 to 60 points even to those church schools in the old Southwest Conference. No wonder I quit going. It's been 15 years. So, I have this friend. He'll go unidentified because he doesn't deserve the embarrassment of widespread association with the likes of me. Some of his happiest childhood times were spent at Razorback games in War Memorial Stadium in the glorious '60s. Owing to that heritage, he springs for two Little Rock seats, good ones, he says, on, or perhaps near, the front row in the vicinity of the 50-yard line on the visitors' side. You're close enough, he says, to chat with the visiting team's players. Years ago, he recalls, some fan a few rows back droned, "Over-rated, over-rated, over-rated" to Tennessee's Peyton Manning. Another classy Hog fan. Insightful, too. Peyton Manning went on to flop in the pros, as you know. Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I held forth at a little social gathering on some of the finer points of the Springdale Bulldog spread and no-huddle offense, which I'd observed the night before in Fort Smith. Everything I said might have been wholly wrong, but apparently I pontificated with a certain red-wined confidence. This friend professed to be impressed. Maybe I wasn't simply an anti-sports doofus after all. Maybe I knew some jock stuff. So, when his better friend bailed, he called to invite me to join him down front for the Mississippi State tussle with all its implications for last place. I pondered, then accepted. It's not every day you get a chance to see two of the worst college football teams in the country. And the visitors-side location would make it difficult if not impossible for me to get in trouble by heckling Houston Nutt. I'll have to heckle him here. Surely the man has the best job in the country. He gets a million-five and is not held to account for productivity. He takes no blame for defeats, then brags on himself after a rare win. Now, after a series of failures and a clear downward spiral, his bosses apparently intend to bring in experts to do the rest of his job for him - the part not already delegated by the $300,000 hiring of what essentially is a separate head coach for the defense. According to the latest strong rumor, the Hogs soon will hire a separate head coach for offense. It may or may not be a fellow named David Cutcliffe, who coached the aforementioned Peyton Manning as the offensive coordinator at Tennessee and later coached Peyton's kid brother, Eli, as head coach at Ole Miss. Houston's job will be pared to this: He' ll lead cheers, sing the fight song, accept obsequious adoration fromsuch journalistic eminences as Chuck Barrett and Paul Eells, say "precious" and "special," then cash his check. The program surely will be better for it. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.- |
