Don't beat yourself up if the name F.C. Longman doesn't ring a bell in University of Arkansas football history. It's a shorter story than might have defied Ernest Hemingway to tell.
The UA football media guide lists Longman seventh among Razorback football coaches since J.C. Futrall (1894), a Latin professor who saw a way to improve student morale, fielded the first Arkansas 11. Longman operated under conditions not unique then and now, lacking money to build a program and without much support outside northwest Arkansas. Arkansas State has been fighting similar odds for years and only recently has the Jonesboro school gotten positive reception from Fayetteville.
Longman's teams went 5-8-3 in a time the UA campus was virtually isolated from Little Rock, the state capital. It would be another 50 years before Razorback football developed seething statewide support, thanks in large part to a redhead from Georgia whose shirttail could be spotted outside his pants on game days. Frank Broyles coached his first Arkansas game in 1958 at War Memorial Stadium with a team that lost to Baylor 12-0 and would finish 4-6. His next three UA teams won Southwest Conference titles -- something first achieved at the school by Fred Thomsen in 1936, Tommy's team beating Texas 6-0 in Little Rock when the state was celebrating its centennial and the Longhorns weren't then mighty.
Arkansas launches another football season Sept. 2 in its first Little Rock opener since what would be Bret Bielema's last Razorbacks (2017) walloped Florida A&M on an August Thursday night. Incoming fourth-year coach Sam Pittman, who has a Little Rock Touchdown Club date Tuesday, has only experienced one in-state home game outside Fayetteville -- that in 2021 against Arkansas-Pine Bluff, a carefully selected opponent.
The 2020 (pandemic) and 2022 seasons were the first since 1948 that Arkansas did not play at War Memorial Stadium, which has long since shown its age and has become a political football in the Great Stadium Debate over whether the Hogs should ever again play there or stage all of its home games on campus in a larger arena.
In its heyday, basically covering the coaching eras of Broyles, Lou Holtz, Ken Hatfield and Houston Nutt, War Memorial Stadium was host to some showpiece games. The advent of Razorback Nation dates to a 1954 Little Rock visit from national power Ole Miss, which a Bowden Wyatt-coached UA squad shocked 6-0. "Suddenly," as my mom would tell the story, "tickets got awfully scarce."
The first great Arkansas-Texas game involving Broyles and Longhorn coach Darrell Royal featured a 13-12 UT victory in 1959, Orville Henry writing that a late Hog fumble prevented a landmark victory in a game that "the operation was successful but the patient died." Arkansas had better luck in Austin, beating Texas there three times in the 1960s.
Arkansas did not beat a Royal-coached team in Little Rock until Joe Ferguson passed the Longhorns silly, 31-7 in 1971. Holtz avenged two losses in the series with a 17-14 tingler in 1979. Arkansas' last Southwest Conference team won 14-13 at Little Rock in 1991 on the day that the first Arkansas Democrat-Gazette rolled off the press, recently unemployed Arkansas-Gazette writers dutifully showing up with no game to cover.
Broyles' 1974 team stunned Southern Cal, which would win a version of the national championship, 26-7 on a night that the UA defense unnerved quarterback Pat Haden. Their 1972 game, also in Little Rock, gained national attention, though in a 31-10 loss to the Trojans, who would win them all that year for coach John McKay, the Razorbacks' inadequacies were plain to see.
The Powder River Play, Buddy Bob Benson passing to Preston Carpenter in the fourth quarter for the only score against Ole Miss in 1954, long stood as the most famous in program and WMS history. That held up until Matt Jones' TD pass to DeCori Birmingham in 2002 against LSU, the 21-20 outcome reflecting the second and last time Arkansas beat a Nick Saban-coached team.
More people may show up Sept. 2 for the tailgate party outside War Memorial Stadium than the game itself. I furthered my football education in Section 4 within, smelling (spilled) liquor and cigar smoke for the first time. In two years Arkansas State plays Arkansas there; too bad Hemingway won't be around to cover that game.