With basketball returning tonight, Arkansas' king sport returns to its rightful throne

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Finally, after weeks of fans trudging through weeks of football with statistically provable little interest, one of the biggest days of the year for Arkansas athletics has finally arrived — the first men's basketball exhibition game.

At places like Georgia, Ohio State, and Oregon where football dominates the culture, such a day would pass by essentially unnoticed, but at a basketball school like Arkansas, it's a big deal. It's so big, in fact, that under former head coach Eric Musselman, an exhibition win over No. 2 Purdue at Bud Walton may have been the most electric atmosphere of the year with more than twice a normal sellout at most college basketball arenas going absolutely nuts the entire afternoon.

The preseason starts off with a salty Cincinnati team that is coming off a deep run in the NIT to finish with 22 wins last season. The Bearcats have already raise eyebrows across the college landscape by going to Ann Arbor and knocking off No. 7 Michigan, 100-98.

That means that, despite this being one of the more anticipated seasons in a few years for the Arkansas Razorbacks, there is a good chance John Calipari gets to teach his team using a lot of mistakes heading into a road game at Memphis to close out exhibition season next Monday.

There are still a handful of people around the state who argue Arkansas is a football school rather than a basketball school, but most of those are former football players from the Bobby Petrino era who were the only athletes to experience what it's like to have a potential Top 5 football team since the early 1980s, even though no one thought their team was ever a threat to earn a national championship.

Meanwhile, there have been numerous times Arkansas fans have thought there was a shot at a national championship in that same span, including winning the school's first and only undisputed national title in any major sport in 1994 before going back to the national championship game the following season.

The discussion essentially ends at Arkansas football having not threatened to win a national championship over the past half century and not be able to beg people to come to their practice games for free while basketball has been to multiple Final Fours and national title games and while packing out their practice games in the one of the largest arenas in all of college basketball.

Bud Walton Arena alone is good proof the Hogs reside at a basketball school. It's the equivalent of Neyland Stadium, the Horse Shoe over at Ohio State or the Big House at Ann Arbor from college football.

Razorbacks football has maxed out at 3/4 of those facilities and struggles to fill it, especially late in the season. Meanwhile, even if things don't go well and there physically are only the equivalent of Razorback Stadium in the building rather than Neyland, every seat is officially sold out anyway.

That means Arkansas is always first or second in attendance every basketball season. Attendance is such an issue that at Razorback Stadium over the years, that athletics directors have chosen to play most of their home games three hours away in Little Rock.

In fact, Arkansas football was still playing at least three of its seven home games, 43%, at tiny War Memorial in Little Rock during this century. That's because, until recently, Razorback Stadium was a tiny, raggedy facility itself.

However, it wasn't the priority in the facilities race. That honor went to Bud Walton as the Hogs raced to build the premiere facility in all of college basketball in 1993, just in time to house Nolan Richardson's national championship run while the president of the United States regularly stopped down not only to watch from Washington, but to show up in person and meet with the team afterward.

Traditionally, football fans have been OK with the Razorbacks making a run to the equivalent of the NIT every few years while missing the postseason all together at times. Things get really exciting when the Hogs make the equivalent of a run to the second round of the NCAA Tournament with extensions for the coach getting whipped out immediately if that happens.

Meanwhile, making the Sweet 16 or Elite 8 is the standard for basketball. Fans don't tolerate NIT level performances, which is why Stan Heath, John Pelphrey and even Mike Anderson were shown the door for results that would have been perfectly fine on the football side of things.

In the past decade, football hasn't even been able to keep fans invested until the end of the season. Instead, they have checked out in November, or, in the case of this season, numbers clearly show they checked out in early September.

Lately, the Razorbacks haven't even been able to keep their players on the team all the way to the end of the season, much less invested long enough to make a genuine effort against Missouri to close the season. That's why the only season the Hogs have tried lately at the end of the year was in 2021 during Sam Pittman's big year.

That's definitely not been an issue for the basketball program that has dominated the postseason over the past half decade as the level of expectation for the team has been restored.

On the recruiting side, basketball regularly pursues 4-stars and 5-stars while football struggles to land 3-star recruits. Even in the lean times while the program tried to figure out how to replace Richardson, there were All-American level players showing up on the roster who went on to big NBA careers.

Part of the recruiting success is because Arkansas is loaded with top level recruits in basketball because it's such a strong basketball state. There are even places where the sport can be played under interstate bridges.

There are so few football recruits in Arkansas that some years it's unclear if there is a single high school player worth taking a risk on as an SEC team. The program just hasn't inspired local athletes the way Razorbacks basketball has.

That's because this is a basketball state and Arkansas is a basketball school. The history supports it. The money supports it. The results support it.

Football is a sometimes fun distraction, although rarely. However, basketball is king.

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