By Harry King
LITTLE ROCK — An offensive coordinator at heart, Clint Conque’s anticipatory skills are keen.
The caller from Little Rock was bumbling through a question about naming the Nov. 28 game between the University of Central Arkansas and North Dakota when the UCA football coach interrupted with “Transition Bowl.”
Nice. Descriptive and uncluttered with corporate names or dot.coms.
Brad Teague, the UCA athletic director, finished second in the name-that-game contest when he promised to call back with some answers about the “Reclassification Bowl.”
UCA and North Dakota are among the 17 teams still in the NCAA pipeline, making the transition to Division I in everything except football. Next year is the fourth and final year for UCA; North Dakota is a year behind the Bears.
The football playoffs for Football Championship Subdivision teams, such as UCA, begin Thanksgiving weekend, but the Bears won’t be eligible to participate until 2010. Knowing that, Conque and Teague huddled a couple of years ago to discuss what could be done for the UCA football players trapped in the transition.
They decided to ask the NCAA if it was permissible to play a game after the last regular-season date.
“When you’re ineligible for postseason, you’ve got to be creative in how you motivate your team,” Conque said.
Yes, the NCAA said, as long as the schools don’t exceed the limit of 11 games.
Immediately, Teague began calling football-playing schools in transition, including three in North Carolina. Some didn’t respond and some said no, but North Dakota was an affirmative.
Located in Grand Forks, North Dakota has been a national power in Division II for years. The Fighting Sioux play home games in a domed stadium that seats 12,283.
The contract is a home and home with no monetary guarantee. UCA will return the game in 2012, the same year the Bears play at Ole Miss.
“For the younger players, we want them to get used to practicing and playing around Dec. 1,” Conque said. “Our perspective is that it’s a postseason bowl game.”
To him, there is nothing better than a football team sharing tackles and turkey during Thanksgiving week.
UCA will begin promoting the game in the early fall, maybe come up with a catchy name and tie it in with something like last year when the Bears teamed up with the Arkansas Rice Depot for the Red Beans and Rice Bowl against McNeese.
Thinking Arkansas would play LSU on Friday afternoon, UCA-North Dakota is scheduled for 1 p.m. on Saturday. But, the Razorback game will remain on Saturday and the kickoff at Conway could be changed.
For UCA, particularly the seniors, the North Dakota game is a nice bookend to a season that begins with a trip to Hawaii for a Friday night game. ESPN is going to show Tulsa-Tulane at 7 p.m. on Sept. 4 and UCA folks are hoping that one of the network’s outlets will take the UCA kickoff that midnight. The game will be a benchmark for the Bears, playing in front of 55,000 or so against a team that faced Notre Dame in a bowl game last year and played in the Sugar Bowl two years ago.
Hawaii is taking care of travel arrangements that include an eight-hour commercial flight out of Dallas in time to practice on Wednesday, Sept. 2. The schedule does allow for five or six hours of beach time prior to the departure early Saturday evening.
Playing Hawaii allows the Bears to exceed the 11-game limit — in this case, a bowl game of their own making.
——-
Harry King is sports columnist for Stephens Media’s Arkansas News Bureau. His e-mail address is hking@arkansasnews.com.
