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State gone wild Thursday, Nov 22, 2007 By John Brummett Arkansas needs to legalize full-fledged casino gambling, maybe even prostitution. Then we could expend our energy on something better for us. There are so many ironies to this mad Razorback obsession. The main one, obviously, is that the state with the lowest percentage of college-educated residents invests much of its scarce money, most of its sense of self-worth and the greater part of its overwrought emotion on games played by 20-year-olds affiliated, however loosely, with a college. Oh, well. There are worse things. We're not hurting anyone but ourselves. Another irony is that a political writer deplores this obsession while writing about it time and again. In his defense, nothing is more political in Arkansas than football. These sports enterprises at the University of Arkansas simply can't seem to stop making the regular news with their soap operas: Coaches suing in federal court, coaches quitting after only one day, coaches' friends who heap e-mailed abuse on a prized recruit and coaches leaving, or not. Speaking of the latter, the Arkansas Traveler student newspaper and a Fort Smith/Fayetteville television station reported last week that the thoroughly mediocre and excuse-making football coach, Houston Nutt, was gone, effective at the end of the season. Then these other TV stations reported, if you could call it that, that there's too much "smoke" not to report the existence of fire. Every official speaking for attribution denied any such thing. Of course, you can't believe anybody with the university. These guys wrote the book on mismanagement, with a gripping epilogue on obfuscation. They said the last basketball coach would keep his job if he went to the NCAA Tournament. Then, when he did, they told him he was fired anyway, so that they could hire a guy who would quit after a day. You couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. So, anyway, the football team went out and won a pretty good game Saturday, and Houston sang the fight song with the band afterward as if he were the same helmet-lover as ever. The next day this coach used the word "had," not have, to refer to his job. But his command of articulation is such that he simply may have misspoken. I wouldn't be a bit surprised now to see the team go to Baton Rouge tomorrow and upset the No. 1 team in the country. Darren McFadden probably will stand up in the dressing room before the team takes the field and say he doesn't care about any Heisman Trophy, but that he wants to win one for the coach. Then Peyton Hillis is likely to stand up and say he's sorry he called the coaches doofuses in the paper, and, anyway, nobody can believe anything in the media. But it turns out the LSU coach might be leaving, too. Why, there's so much drama attending this contest that both teams will probably forget all about that boot, the hideous thing in the shape of the two states that the busybody David Bazzel cooked up as a winner's trophy to fabricate a big rivalry. Arkansas doesn't have a big rivalry, except for the big one with itself. After the game, one of these things will happen: -Everyone in an official role will say nothing is decided and that we will soon have the usual annual review of the coach's performance. -A school official will say that, yes, those reports of the coach's departure were basically correct and that this game was Houston's last, because he's been here a long time and all that off-the-field stuff simply has become too distracting and divisive. -After leading the fans in the fight song, Houston will tell everybody to take the job and shove it, then moon us and announce that he's accepting a job somewhere else, perhaps in the automotive sales field. That option about mooning - it would be a fitting departure for the coach, and it would serve the rest of us about right. ------- 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. |
