By Steve Brawner
Last week was the big signing day for college football recruits, and it didn’t seem to be a very good one for the University of Arkansas, though time will tell.
More than 46 years ago, Razorback fans were enduring what seemed to be a more enduring disappointment: a 1963 season in which the Razorbacks, expected to contend for a Southwest Conference football championship, instead struggled to a 5-5 record.
The 1964 team wasn’t expected to contend for much of anything. The players were not loaded with talent, but they did have a commitment to the team and to each other. Following their next-to-last game of the 1963 season (a loss), the juniors had approached Coach Frank Broyles on the plane ride home and told him they were dedicating the rest of that season to preparing for the next one, and they had worked hard individually to prepare that summer.
Once the season started, they began piling up victories – not very impressively at first, but then they defeated Texas, 14-13, in Austin and then rattled off five shutout victories. After beating Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl, they earned the national championships awarded by several organizations.
Who were those kids winning week after week? A partial list includes: Jerry Jones, future owner of the Dallas Cowboys; Jimmy Johnson, who went on to win a national championship coaching the Miami Hurricanes and two Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys; straight A student Randy Stewart, who became a top oil executive; Jim Lindsey, future real estate magnate; Bobby Crockett, now a prominent Little Rock attorney; Ken Hatfield, future coach of the Razorbacks; and his brother, Dick, now a successful attorney. I could wear out my semicolon button going through the rest of the list of civic and business leaders. Moreover, two assistant coaches, Johnny Majors and a very young Barry Switzer, went on to win college national championships as head coaches.
It’s impossible to know if the members of that team were winners in life because of what they learned on the football field or if they won on the football field because they already were winners in life. Probably more of the latter. If the team hadn’t stopped a late-game two-point conversion against Texas or made a fourth quarter comeback against Nebraska in the Cotton Bowl, we wouldn’t be talking about them as national champions, but we would still be talking about them.
While Broyles’ squad was part of what Sports Illustrated called a multi-year “dynasty,” today’s Razorbacks are in the middle of the pack. Occasionally the program can contend for SEC championships and, very rarely, a national one, but then it has to rebuild, unlike powers such as Florida that can simply reload.
That doesn’t stop Head Coach Bobby Petrino from being the highest paid state employee with an annual income of $2.7 million, albeit most coming from sources other than state funds. He’s being paid the equivalent of 60 public school teachers not to produce future NFL owners and business leaders but to try to produce another national championship. If he doesn’t win consistently, and by consistently, I mean almost every year, he’ll be fired. If he begins to win big, the program probably will be forced to match the $4 million a year Urban Meyer is making at Florida and Nick Saban is making at Alabama.
He’s being paid to produce another 1964 season at a program no one outside the state considers a “dynasty” anymore. It’s doubtful that many Arkansans will scale back expectations, but maybe they can cheer on the team even when times are tough, and at least keep in mind that, sometimes, a team’s biggest successes can best be measured many years after a season ends.
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Steve Brawner is a freelance journalist, a former newspaper editor, and a former aide to former Gov. Mike Huckabee and Lt. Gov. Win Rockefeller. His e-mail address is brawnersteve@mac.com.
