If It Weren't for Texas Arrogance, Hogs Would Be Where Oregon St. Will Be This February

Longhorns had every chance to send Arkansas athletics spiraling in early '90s, but big ego in Austin saved Razorback programs

Author:
Kent Smith
Updated:
Feb 23, 2024 8:34 AM EST
Original:
Feb 23, 2024

In this story:

Arkansas Razorbacks

[This story originally ran July 27, 2023. It has been updated to reflect moves in conference made by Cal and Stanford.]

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – When Arkansas squares against Oregon State in Arlington, Texas next February as part of the Kubota College Baseball Series, odds are high the Beavers will no longer be part of the Pac-12.

Not because they are likely to go jetting off to a new conference. There just won't be a Pac 12 to still belong. The three most valuable pieces of the conference will soon be gone. USC and UCLA are leaving for the Big Ten and Colorado has begun packing its Deion Sanders to leave town for the Big 12, taking all the remaining television money with it.

That has sent the members of the Pac 12 into a mad scramble. Utah, Airzona and Arizona State appear to have standing offers to jump ship to a Big 12 Conference at one point considered extending from Connecticut to the West Coast.

Meanwhile, Oregon St., Washington State, California and Stanford were left behind to fight to the death to see which two schools would get left behind. In the end, Cal and Stanford agree to fly all the way to New Jersey and South Florida to play games in the ACC rather than stick around trying to piece together what would have been a cash strapped glorified Mountain West Conference.

As for Oregon St. and Washington St., they find themselves where Arkansas would have been years ago had it not been for Frank Broyles, Eddie Sutton and Nolan Richardson – looking like Stitch from "Lilo and Stitch" in that tear-jerking scene where he's alone in the woods saying "lost" over and over. Both schools are left without a conference anyone is willing to recognize. Odds are high they eventually work out a deal to be formally adopted by the Mountain West schools under the Pac 12 banner because, honestly, there's nowhere else to go. That would be ironic because they would be begging San Diego State to accept them, a team those two teams helped send spinning in limbo in a publicly embarrassing shun when the Aztecs tried to join the Pac-12.

Arkansas fans should take in the plight of the Beavers and Cougars. If Broyles hadn't been proactive or Roy Kramer not been actively seeking a school to add to help beef up its basketball resume while providing Kentucky a challenge, this would have been the Razorbacks. Fans like to beat their chests and wish Arkansas had chosen to go to the Big 12 because of the easier competition on the football field, but that was never an option.

Texas was leaving Arkansas behind. The Razorbacks were to be left out in the cold as one final parting shot by the Longhorns. Broyles knew this was going down behind the scenes and that the Razorbacks were to be bunched in with TCU, Houston, SMU and Rice as homeless schools.

The Longhorns decided back in 1984, once the television rights court ruling came down, that getting out of Southwest Conference was best. A conference made up of just Texas with a hint of Arkansas didn't provide a varied enough television market to hold up in the world that was about to unfold and University of Texas president Bill Cunningham knew that.

He immediately began looking around for a new home and the primary target was the Pac-10. Cunningham had been approached by University of Georgia president Charles Knapp in Washington D.C. about joining the SEC a year before Arkansas announced its whirlwind courtship with the league. Fortunately for the Razorbacks, Cunningham decided to see what interest the Big Ten and Pac-10 had because Texas and Texas A&M would have been the two schools taken by the SEC instead of Arkansas and South Carolina.

Cunningham became enamored by the Pac-10. Meanwhile, Texas A&M fell in love with the SEC. Odds are the two would have ended up in the Pac-10 had it not been for Stanford. The Longhorns truly were the big brother of the two back then and the SEC was at the bottom of the Texas wish list of potential new homes. The Aggies were coming to the Pac 10 whether they liked it or not.

That is until the Stanford president Donald Kennedy killed a deal with the Longhorns to enter the conference. Cunningham said Kennedy came back a few weeks later and said Texas would be welcome to join, but the Longhorns' ego had already been bruised and Cunningham had already expended too much political capital to look weak accepting membership after being initially rejected.

Texas A&M still wanted the SEC while Texas needed to maintain its projection of power and wanted no part of the SEC, so talks began with the Big 8. At the time, while a lot of people didn't know it, the Big 8 was a conference in similar turmoil to today's Pac-12. The Big Ten was looking to take Kansas, Nebraska and Missouri and also was considering Texas and reportedly Iowa St. However, according to Cunningham, time tables never worked out with the Big Ten, so putting together some sort of merger with the Big 8 became a priority.

Along with stability issues, the Big 8 had television market problems. There aren't a lot of major markets in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa. Colorado held the only Top 20 TV market with Denver, although a low Top 20, and the only other market in the Top 40 was Kansas City in the 30s. The appeal of merging with the Southwest Conference was adding Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio to the pitch for television money. Austin didn't add much at the time, but despite not being terribly great at football, the Longhorns were still a big national brand.

No one could really picture a large conference in those days, so when initial discussions began by conceiving a conference that included all of the Big 8 and the remaining Southwest Conference schools, it was initially viewed as creating two new conferences by some involved. For Kansas State coach Bill Snyder, it was thought of as creating a pair of have and have-not conferences.

"My idea is that we take the bottom half of the Southwest Conference, and the bottom half of the Big Eight Conference and we merge them," Snyder told reporters back in the early '90s. "We take ourselves, Kansas perhaps, maybe Oklahoma State, perhaps Missouri or Iowa State. Then we take the same group out of the Southwest Conference—TCU, SMU, maybe Houston, Rice, perhaps Texas Tech. We put them all together and we contract a bowl game."

However, Texas, much like Arkansas, knew how much of a drag Houston, Rice, TCU and SMU were on attendance no matter how good the team performed. Soon, they were able to convince the Big Ten courted Big 8 schools to stick around. The three biggest schools from the Lone Star State, Texas Tech, Texas A&M and Texas were coming, and because of a political move orchestrated behind the scenes by then Texas governor Ann Richards, Baylor. The addition of the Bears pleased Iowa State coach Jim Walden who said a team was being added he felt he could beat.

Even still, Texas was bitter about the whole Pac-10 debacle. When a shaky decision finally came down by the Big 8 to go forward with the merger, the Longhorns made it clear they were settling. There had been a change of heart in Austin and the desired move became the Pac-10. However, state legislators determined Texas Tech had to be part of the package deal and the Pac-10 wasn't willing to accept a school in such low academic standing.

Bob Bergdahl, who had taken over as University of Texas president, but not the conference decision-making power held by then Chancellor Cunningham, closed the agreement with the Big 8 by reportedly saying "If I had my way, we'd join the Pac-10." Clearly, the merger was doomed from the start as it was evident the Big 12 needed Texas way more than Texas wanted the Big 12.

And all of that comes full circle to this February. Had Stanford had the foresight to see the value Texas would bring to the conference, the Longhorns would be in the Pac-12 with Texas A&M and things would likely have held stable. Oregon State wouldn't be unsure of what it technically calls home this fall.

The culture of Austin is a much better fit with the Pac-12. It bills itself as the Hollywood of Middle America. It's home to several actors and entertainers, has gone out of its way to lure tech companies from California, and its rolling hills along the Colorado River and Lake Travis have become home to a surge of West Coast implants following their tech and film industry jobs. Texas also takes a great deal of pride in its strong academic reputation, so it would have been a much better marriage than the Big 12.

On the other hand, had the Longhorns not thought of themselves as too good to associate with the riff-raff residing in the SEC, Arkansas would have been in a mess. The Razorbacks couldn't have rolled into the Big 8 and pulled off what Texas did to save it. The Hogs would have had to either join the group of 25 independents at the time that would soon begin to shrink once Penn State made the move to the Big Ten, or try to pair up with TCU in joining the WAC.

There were no other viable options. Most of the conferences people think of now didn't exist. There were nine conferences at the time, most of which comprised of eight teams, and one of them was going away in the SWC and the Big 8 was dissolving also.

If Texas and Texas A&M went to the SEC, that would have closed off all of the power conferences to the Razorbacks. The Hogs weren't getting into the Big Ten or Pac-10 because of cultural fit and lack of AAU membership. The ACC wouldn't have taken them because no one was willing to travel that far for conference games in those days to appease a single outlier. The money just wasn't there at the time. Although, with the terrible contract the ACC is stuck with, it's not there now either.

Even the little conferences would have been a difficult sell for the Razorbacks. The MAC wouldn't have accepted them. Arkansas had great basketball and baseball programs at the time and fairly recent success with back-to-back-to-back SWC championships in football, but there was no connection to the Detroit and Ohio Valley areas of the country. It also wouldn't have worked on the Razorbacks' end eihter. As entertaining as that conference was, Toledo, Bowling Green and Eastern Michigan aren't moving tickets, even if numbers in Fayetteville had fallen into the upper 20,000s when the lower end SWC schools came to town.

That only left the Mountain West. TCU was willing to go to Hawaii to claw its way back, and Broyles did allow Arkansas to schedule Colorado State for what turned out to be a tough game in Little Rock in 1990, but it's unlikely the Razorbacks would have joined what turned out to be one of college football's most entertaining leagues.

The most likely scenario would have been Arkansas and South Carolina riding it out as independents until 1996. At that time, there's a chance the Razorbacks and Gamecocks could have been convinced to become founding members of Conference USA. That would have included a conference featuring Memphis, Louisville, Southern Miss, Houston, Cincinnati and Tulane. It would have been a powerful basketball conference, which would have suited Arkansas, and all of those schools saw flashes of greatness at some point in time in football.

There's a chance that if the Big 12 never happens, then Texas Tech and Baylor also end up in Conference USA with the possibility of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State also. That probably means Tulane and Southern Miss don't make it. The Green Wave don't have the pedigree and Hattisburg, Mississippi simply doesn't bring the eyeballs.

A schedule that looked like this might have had appeal to Arkansas fans had it played out that way in 1996.

Sept. 7 SMU
Sept. 21 Oklahoma*
Sept. 28 Ole Miss
Oct. 5 Texas Tech*
Oct. 12 Louisiana Tech
Oct. 19 @South Carolina*
Nov. 2 @ Oklahoma St.*
Nov. 9 vs. Cincinnati*
Nov. 16. @ Baylor*
Nov. 23 @Louisville*
Nov. 29 vs. Memphis*

While that wouldn't have been the worst set-up, especially on the basketball side of things considering the rivalry between Arkansas and Memphis at the time on the court and in recruiting, it's not anywhere close to the life Razorback fans enjoy now. The money wouldn't have been as big, the facilities wouldn't be as spectacular and the stage wouldn't be as grand.

Arkansas fans always gripe about the arrogance of the people at the University of Texas. However, it's their arrogance that allows the Razorbacks to afford the life of security and luxury they now lead. It's the difference between comfortably raking in millions while dominating college athletics in so many sports rather than being the Oregon State athletic program the Razorbacks will meet in February.
The feeling Beavers fans grapple with right now is a feeling of lost that no fan base wants to experience.,