In case you haven't flipped to the sports pages lately or tuned in a talking head, radio or television, be advised that Southeastern Conference football Media Days are here.
And since 1992, they have included the Arkansas Razorbacks, sometimes for better, too often (in the last decade) for worse. Arkansas, if you must know, is not a prime attraction in Atlanta this week, especially with Georgia the defending national champion and Alabama the 2021 runner-up and Alabama coach Nick Saban perhaps soon to break into rashes regarding Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher over recruiting.
Though his team won a bowl game last year (over Penn State in the Outback), Arkansas coach Sam Pittman likely will steer clear of the shrapnel fire sure to find Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin and sometimes mouthy Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz, both one-time prospects for the job Pittman obtained in 2020. No coach ever got more fanfare from a 3-7 season than Pittman in his first year on the job. His second team went 9-4, exposing Texas early and playing a one-point game in defeat at Ole Miss while beating LSU at Baton Rouge and scaring Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Along the way, they severed a losing streak to Texas A&M while extending one (now 15 games) against Alabama.
Unless Pittman, who with a house on Lake Hamilton is seen often in our community, goes cycle riding, which following Bobby Petrino should be verboten for any future Razorback coach, it might be a routine meet-and-greet session for Arkansas with the SEC press. Bob Holt, longtime beat writer of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has achieved legendary status among his conference brethren, especially now that the great Jerry Tipton (basketball mostly) has retired at the (Lexington) Herald Leader.
Starting this week, Holt and co-worker Tom Murphy become two of the hardest-working men in this branch of show business. Holt, a Missouri man (as was our former colleague Nate Allen and as is our Oaklawn handicapper, the former Democrat-Gazette deputy sports editor, Jeff Krupsaw) is more readable than his alma mater is watchable at times.
Mainly because of distance and that the weeklong clambake interferes with the Saratoga and Del Mar racing seasons, I have never attended SEC Media Days. Wally Hall is anchoring the Democrat-Gazette team in Atlanta, as he did when the Little Rock paper did business as the Democrat and the Razorbacks labored in the Southwest Conference. Wally has been known to play the horses -- many a pleasant afternoon we have spent at Churchill Downs, one time at Belmont Park -- but, alas, Georgia does not have a thoroughbred track.
Doubt many of my brethren stick around town until Friday when the Los Angeles Angels (Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, former parent team of the Arkansas Travelers) start a weekend series with the world champion Braves at Truist Field.
Growing up, my football interest escalated every year when the Southwest Conference conducted its Media Days. Before that, really, when Dave Campbell's Texas Football magazine (and its Arkansas edition) hit newsstands.
The Waco scribe unofficially chaired a gaggle of sports writers including Orville Henry of the Arkansas Gazette (later of the Democrat), Blackie Sherrod of the Dallas Times Herald (later of the Morning News), Lou Maysel of the Austin American-Statesman and Jack Gallagher of the Houston Post. Dallas writer Frank Luksa, a true wordsmith, once wrote a column addressing rumors that Texas basketball coach Abe Lemons had died and that he called his number and, as I remember, asked Abe if he were dead and, if so, would he care to comment?
Henry, as much as anyone my newspaper mentor though we never worked for the same paper, wrote one time of an SWC coach so clueless that "he could coach both sides in the Naive Bowl." Sounds like recent ex-Razorback coach Chad Morris. TCU, forever losing to Arkansas after the arrival of Frank Broyles, had one coach topple dead on the sideline and hired another, it was said in the Arkansas media, mainly because he beat the Hogs while at Tulsa.
Things got so bad one year at Rice, coach Ray Alborn said, that ladies of the evening (he used earthier language) on South Main, the main drag in Houston, "wouldn't wave back." Don't know if, in recent years, that it ever got that bad on Dickson Street and other Fayetteville hotspots. But who wouldn't rather follow a winning team.