We Have One Word for the Razorbacks: “Congrats”
Arkansas is finally, FINALLY taking a meaningful step to establishing in-state rivalries.
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Well done, Razorbacks. You’ve opened your mind to a much larger world.
This isn’t sarcasm. My congratulations is genuine. When the University of Arkansas football program announced that it would be playing its sibling-campus, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff in 2021, it put to an end a longstanding and misguided policy of avoiding athletic conflict with in-state programs. It was time. It was long past time.
The Razorbacks had already dipped a foot into this pool by hosting another sibling campus, UA Little Rock, for a game of baseball – for which the Little Rock Trojans came out on top. The nationally ranked Hogs may have lost the game, but fans awoke up the next morning with the cosmos (and their recruiting) still intact. Go figure, life was going on.
So now the Golden Lions football team, a member of the SWAC since 1998, will finally be invited to the flagship campus – first on October 23, 2021 , and then again on August 31, 2024. The Razorbacks haven’t been this gracious to an in-state contemporary since 1944, when Arkansas trounced Arkansas-Monticello 41-0.
What will the Razorbacks gain from this act of sportsmanship? Well, it should quell some grumbling among fans who see the University of Arkansas’ exclusionary actions as petty and counterproductive. But the biggest gain will be felt by its partner in education, UAPB – not because the Golden Lions have a shot at victory. But because the exposure will do the campus – which receives a fraction of Fayetteville’s resources – some much needed good.
University of Arkansas at Pine Pine Bluff has been party of the University of Arkansas system since 1972. The Razorbacks have ignored their sports programs for nearly 50 years. In 2021, upon a gridiron fertilized by a bottomless coffer of money, a wrong will be righted.
And it’s about damn time.
A former notary public, Jeremy Harper is a professional writer and Chief Instigator for Storm the Castle Creative. He spends much of his free time staring blankly into space.
