Inside Nick Saban’s school of QB development, from practice field trash talk to Sunday morning film sessions
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Alex Scarborough, ESPN Staff Writer
Greg McElroy recalled waiting until after his freshman year in 2007 to ask Alabama coach Nick Saban for a favor. McElroy figured Saban didn’t need the whole backstory about his dad’s lifelong dream to see him wear Joe Namath’s number, so he pulled Saban aside one day and asked him straight up for the change to No. 12.
“You know,” Saban said, “that’s the number I wore.”
McElroy said he shot back, “Yeah, that’s of course why I want to switch to it. Namath, [Kenny] Stabler, those guys have nothing to do with it. It’s really about you.”
Saban obliged, but the accommodation came with expectations. Because Saban not only wore No. 12, he wore it while quarterbacking his high school to a state championship in 1968. It’s a fact that every Alabama quarterback who spoke to ESPN said they were aware of — even Bryce Young, who wasn’t born until three decades later. Young grinned and said Saban will “tell you about the West Virginia days, for sure.”
A former Monongah High teammate, Walter Baranski, said Saban was “the top dog out there.” Jim Pulice, another teammate, added, “He could walk out on the field and see a defense and catch it all.”
Tua Tagovailoa said Saban would boast that “he’s the best athlete.” Saban was well rounded, all-state in basketball and baseball as well. If he wasn’t a few hairs shy of 6-feet, he might have lasted longer as a quarterback at Kent State before making the switch to defensive back. “I couldn’t see as well, especially in the pocket,” Saban recalled of the transition to college. “But if it just came to throwing the ball and doing that stuff, I was OK.”
While he never switched back to offense, instead developing into one of the preeminent defensive minds in football, his background playing quarterback informed his relationship with the position as a head coach. We spoke to seven current or former starters at Alabama to learn more about their day-to-day interactions. Together, they told the story of a coach who invests his time in order to build trust and ultimately benefit the team. There are regular one-on-one meetings that can range from discussion of X’s and O’s and personnel to how to handle interpersonal relationships and the grind of a long season — all made lighter by Saban’s occasional ribbing.
“I threw a good spiral,” McElroy said. “But in the rare instance if I threw a ball that wasn’t perfect or wasn’t pretty, you were going to hear about it from him.”
Blake Sims, who started 14 games for Alabama in 2014, can picture Saban now, running behind him after the stretch period of practice and chiding him, “Hey 6, I bet you can’t throw the ball like this.” Saban would then gather the defensive backs for individual drills, planting his right leg and tossing passes to them as they ran down the sideline. Always a good loft, almost always a tight spiral.
“Hey 6,” Sims remembers Saban bellowing, “you need to come over here and throw like this.”
Jake Coker, who followed Sims as the starter, laughed at his version of the same story. He said it’s a shame most people don’t get to experience Saban’s sharp sense of humor, including some “legendary jokes” he says aren’t fit for print.
“There’s something funny about seeing a 70-year-old in a straw hat throwing the ball around and cussing 20-year-olds out,” Coker said.
While Saban was never shy about dolling out a tongue-lashing in public, in private Coker and other former Alabama quarterbacks paint a different picture of the coach. Coker said Saban met with him often while he battled Cooper Bateman for the starting job early in 2015. Saban sensed Coker getting in his own way — too worried about messing up and agonizing over his reads instead of letting the ball go.
“He’d talk to me and get me to a place where I was going out there and reacting instead of overthinking each moment,” Coker said. “A lot of our conversations were tailored toward the mental aspect.”
He added, “I would say he’s the best at managing emotions of any coach I’ve been around. I mean, when he gets mad, you know you deserve it. And when he pats you on the back, you deserve it.”
This year’s starter, Jalen Milroe, has felt both the sting of disappointment and the joy of success with Saban — and often in a public setting.
Along the way, as Alabama recovered from an early-season loss and found its way back to the College Football Playoff, Saban challenged Milroe.
“Embrace hard,” Milroe recalled Saban telling him, “and embrace the role of being a quarterback and being a leader of the team.”
SIMS AND OTHERS describe Saban as something of a clairvoyant, knowing exactly the right buttons to push at exactly the right time. It certainly looked that way at halftime of the 2017 national championship when Saban benched former SEC Offensive Player of the Year Jalen Hurts in favor of a true freshman, Tagovailoa. And it worked again this season when he sat Milroe a week after he threw two interceptions in a loss to Texas. Milroe responded by finishing sixth in the Heisman Trophy voting and leading Alabama to the playoff, where it will face Michigan in the Rose Bowl presented by Prudential on Monday (5 p.m. ET, ESPN).
Sims said he’s asked all the time about what makes Saban different — how can he bench an accomplished starter and not lose them for the rest of the season? Hurts sat most of the 2018 season behind Tagovailoa but was ready to go when his number was called in the SEC championship game, coming off the sideline to beat Georgia after Tagovailoa was hobbled by an ankle injury. Sims said that’s possible only because Saban makes a point of getting to know his players, so he understands how to keep them motivated and engaged.
“I was that type of player that if you tell me I won the position, maybe I might slack off a little bit. But if I knew I was always in competition, I played to the top of my ability,” Sims said. “And maybe Coach Saban knew that. …’Just as quick as I named you the starting quarterback, I can take it from you.'”
Go back to the 2014 season after Sims came out of the gates hot, throwing for 445 yards and four touchdowns against Florida in a pivotal Week 4 matchup. He went from a former receiver no one expected anything from to one of the most exciting players in the SEC.
And then Saban stopped him in the hallway one day.
“I had nothing but rat poison all on me. He could just smell it and everything,” Sims said. “And he just pulled me in his office and just gave it to me. I can’t remember his exact words, but he just gave me an ear full.
“When I walked out of there, man, I think I went straight to the weight room.”
Sims laughed.
“How he finds things out, I don’t know,” he said. “I still wonder to this day.”
But go back a few weeks earlier, the morning of the Florida game that put Sims on the map, and you get another side of Saban’s mentorship.
Sims was nervous — it being his first start in Bryant-Denny Stadium — as he headed to breakfast at the team hotel. That’s when strength coach Scott Cochran growled at him, “Walk around that corner. Coach Saban wants to talk to you.”
Saban was waiting for him and said, “So Sims, what do we need to do to get you going? For you to be comfortable?”
Sims decided to be honest.
“Coach,” he said, “when I go fast it gets me in my rhythm where I don’t have to think. Let’s just go.”
Saban asked, “So NASCAR?” which is shorthand for the hurry-up offense.
Sims said yes.
Saban shook his head and said, “OK.”
That Saban wanted his input was humbling, Sims said. That he was open to shifting from a ball-control style of offense to more uptempo was a lesson Sims said he thinks about a lot now, coaching at Mt. Bethel Christian Academy in Marietta, Georgia.
“Seeing him do that lets you know even when you’re at the top of your game, you still need help,” he said. “You can’t do it by yourself.”
Sims cherishes his relationship with Saban. He went from being unsure about whether Saban knew his name to being comfortable tossing barbs back and forth.
Saban told Sims often about his Monongah days, specifically how he was given the freedom by his coach to call plays.
“But we let him know, ‘Hey, Coach, you play in this day and time and we’ll smack you,'” Sims said.
Speaking to Milroe earlier this season, Saban leaned on his hoops background, advising the dual-threat QB to “be a point guard with the ball and get the ball to playmakers to allow explosive plays.”
“Initially, you’d probably think it was just Coach Saban talking, but it’s also an opportunity for me to talk,” Milroe said of their conversations. “A lot of times, we just talk about life. He’s helped me with some personal things, and he’s been there for me throughout the season. The main thing is that we both talk, what we see in games, feedback from games. He sees a lot of things I don’t see, and he’s always willing to listen if I see something.”
Young enjoyed two seasons starting for Saban and “being able to have a conversation about some bigger picture stuff — about the team, about stuff he’s feeling, what he sees, what he needs from us as leaders, and us, our side.”
“We’re all kind of working towards that same goal,” he said. “So it was really cool just coming as a freshman, proving myself. That’s something you have to earn at Alabama. You have to earn that trust, earn everything. And then getting to that point definitely my last two years of building our relationship and then being to where it is now, I’m super grateful.”
AJ McCARRON REMEMBERS his Sunday morning one-on-one debriefing sessions with Saban.
“He was always up there early,” he recalled. “We would sit there and watch the film from the game, and most of the time we’d watch the whole film, kind of just see the flow of the game, talk about the flow, talk about their defense, what else they could have done, what we could have done as an offense, in my opinion.
“But I liked doing that as a freshman just because I got to learn a lot, even from the defensive side, what’s their thought process on things and how they see certain formations and how they plan to cover certain routes and stuff.”
Sometimes, McElroy said, you’d look forward to those meetings. Other times, not so much.
“You could kind of tell where the meeting was going to go based on how you played,” McElroy said.
Asked if he was thinking of a specific meeting, McElroy groaned.
“One in particular,” he said. “It was awful.”
It was the Sunday after playing Ole Miss in 2009. It was McElroy’s first truly hostile road environment, Alabama was undefeated, and the Rebs were ranked. And McElroy was off from the start. Coaches called “Boom,” which McElroy said is a “smash concept with a guy in the flat and a guy running a corner.”
The first time, he threw it into double coverage to Julio Jones for an incompletion.
The next time, on the opposite end of the field, he again threw it into double coverage to Jones for an incompletion.
It just so happened that both times the receiver in the flat was wide open.
McElroy woke up Sunday morning dreading going to Saban’s office.
“I knew he would say, ‘Why didn’t you take the flat?’ And I didn’t really have a reason,” he said. “You can’t say I was looking at the rush.”
Never mind he had a good excuse.
“Greg Hardy cleaned my clock on the first play of the game,” he said.
So McElroy thought about it and came up with an admittedly “ridiculous excuse” about Julio being open.
Saban wasn’t buying it.
“He was so disgruntled, he wanted me to go down and get checked for a concussion because my reads were so bad,” McElroy said. “I know it was his way of jabbing at me. He said, ‘You need to go down and see [head trainer Jeff Allen] and get checked. That’s ridiculous.’
“Jeff was a good sport about it, Coach was a good sport about it. After the fact we can laugh about it. But at the time, it was like, ‘Oh, God. I can’t believe I made the same mistake twice.’ Because the one thing was, he could live with a mistake. That happens. But you make the same mistake twice, you need to tighten it up.”
In games, McElroy and other quarterbacks described Saban as mostly hands off. The only time they’d hear from him is if they committed a mental error — like the time Coker didn’t throw the ball away at the end of the first half of a blowout win and cost the team a field goal.
“That was one of those headset-tearing-apart moments where he got me pretty much from the sideline all the way to the tunnel,” Coker said. “It was one of those where as soon as I did it I thought, ‘Oh my God, you’re such a dumbass. I know I’m going to hear about this all the way back to the locker room.’ And I did. He lost his mind.”
Coker couldn’t remember exactly what Saban said, it was such a blur of expletives. Coker muttered “Yes, sir” again and again in hopes it would end the conversation quicker.
“If it’s within your mental control, I mean, he’s going to be mad about it,” he said. “But if you’re going 100% and you just screw it up, then he can live with that. If you screw up, he moves on. And if you throw a good ball, he is high-fiving.”
It turns out that backups get worn out a lot more than starters, McElroy said, and with good reason.
“He didn’t want to affect the starter’s confidence and he wanted to just make sure the starter felt good,” he said. “And the backup, if you make a mistake, you’re very much in developmental mode at that point, so your confidence isn’t quite as important.”
So much of playing quarterback is what happens between the ears, and Saban is careful to keep that in mind.
When Coker met with him, they didn’t spend a ton of time going over the playbook, he said. It was more about situational awareness — “on and off the field.” Coker said Saban gave him good advice on how to “maneuver through the season” and handle personal relationships on the team.
Together, they won a national championship.
And, like Milroe, it started with Coker riding the bench early in the season.
Would he have liked to avoid the stress of all that? Sure.
But he can’t argue with the results.
“I don’t know, maybe if I was named the starter and I knew that everybody that had my back I would’ve gone in and played with a lot more confidence and played with no restraint as well,” Coker said. “But I know benching me made me that way for sure.”
ESPN reporters Ben Baby, David Newton and Marcel Louis-Jacques contributed to this story.
LOS ANGELES — Dodgers right-hander Brusdar Graterol will miss the first half of next season after having surgery to repair the labrum in his right shoulder.
The surgery was performed Thursday by Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the Dodgers announced Friday.
Graterol is expected to return in the second half of the 2025 season.
Graterol pitched in seven games during the regular season and three games in the World Series against the New York Yankees, which the Dodgers won in five games. He allowed three hits over 2⅓ scoreless innings in those World Series appearances.
The 26-year-old was slowed this season by shoulder inflammation and a hamstring injury.
Graterol, a hard-throwing Venezuelan, spent his first season in the majors with Minnesota in 2019, and the Twins traded him to the Dodgers before the 2020 season. For his career, he has a 2.78 ERA and 11 saves in 188 games.
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Bill Connelly, ESPN Staff Writer
At SEC media days in July, Steve Sarkisian inadvertently described a good portion of college football in a single line. “I feel like when you go to Arkansas,” the Texas Longhorns coach said, “I almost at times feel like they hate Texas more than they like themselves. That’s a real rivalry.”
Later that week, Arkansas Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman confirmed Sarkisian’s take. “We hadn’t played Texas for years,” he said, “and when we played them a couple of years back, it was the most excited our fan base has been in a while. So I would say he’s probably right.”
Houston Nutt can testify. Nutt grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He idolized legendary Arkansas coach Frank Broyles and watched him battle Darrell Royal and the Longhorns before playing for the Razorbacks himself.
“When Texas came to play Arkansas, it was this huge, huge thing,” he told ESPN in 2019. “I remember being taught at the age of 6 outside War Memorial Stadium [in Little Rock] how to do the Hook ‘Em Horns Down sign.”
Nutt beat the Horns as the Hogs’ coach, a 27-6 win in the 2000 Cotton Bowl, Arkansas’ first bowl win since 1985. He turned around, and threw the Horns Down to the Arkansas fans.
“It was a sea of red, and they were mostly doing the Hook ‘Em Horns Down,” Nutt said. “What did I do? I can’t help it. I’m right there with ’em.”
Conference realignment has broken countless rivalries through the years. There are no Oklahoma-Oklahoma State games on the schedule; Missouri and Kansas haven’t played since 2011; Cal has traded playing UCLA for playing NC State; Oregon-Oregon State and Washington-Washington State have been moved from the traditional bottom of the schedule to the top; Pitt and West Virginia play only sporadically, as do Oklahoma and Nebraska. But in the “thank God for small favors” department, this latest round of realignment at least reignited a few rivalries to replace the further ones we lost. Longtime Big 8 and Big 12 rivals Oklahoma and Missouri played this past Saturday for the first time in 13 years (and celebrated the occasion with a particularly wacky finish), and on Nov. 30 not only will we get our first Texas vs. Texas A&M game since 2011 but it also might have enormous College Football Playoff stakes.
While we wait for Aggies-Horns, however, we get a rivalry game that, for quite a while, outshined Texas-A&M and defined Southwest Conference football. On Saturday, Texas and Arkansas will play for just the fourth time in 20 years and will play as conference rivals for the first time in 33. Most rivalries fit into certain parameters — the dueling heavyweights that split the wins over time, the heavyweight against the aspirant that measures itself by how well it’s faring against the big dog, etc. — but over the course of a few decades, Arkansas-Texas fit into multiple categories. Arkansas was the aggrieved and aspirant underdog for much of the series, but for much of the 1960s, when Royal and Broyles were at the top of their respective games, this was the biggest game in college football. Whichever flavor it takes on at a given time, this game remains spicy.
Texas is 8-1 and listed as a favorite by more than two touchdowns Saturday, while Arkansas is 5-4, having handed Tennessee its only loss of the season but suffered two blowout losses in its past four games. The Razorbacks are volatile underdogs; the Longhorns are SEC title favorites; and, for at least a little while Saturday, Razorback Stadium will be an absolute cauldron. To prepare ourselves, let’s look back at 10 of the most noteworthy games in this revived rivalry’s history.
No. 3 Texas 20, No. 14 Arkansas 0 (1946)
“Steers Trounce Tough Porkers For 5th Victory” was the headline in the Austin American. At 3-0-1, Arkansas was off to its best start in 13 years, and for the first time these teams met as mutually ranked foes. But Texas, also unbeaten and the winner of three of the past four Southwest Conference (SWC) crowns, handled both the moment and the muggy conditions better. Future pro and college football Hall of Famer Bobby Layne threw a pair of touchdown passes — one to Hub Bechtol for 50 yards, one to Jim Canady for 47 — and the Longhorns had scored all their points by halftime. This was a pretty common result: Aside from a mid-1930s run in which Texas lost its way as a program and Arkansas won five of six games between them, UT dominated the early stages of this rivalry, winning 29 of the first 35 battles. It’s been a lot closer since then.
This was the high-water mark for the “Steers,” by the way, as they would fall via road upset to both Rice and TCU, handing Arkansas only its second SWC title. The Razorbacks would head to Dallas, where they endured a 0-0 tie with LSU in the Cotton Bowl.
No. 3 Texas 13, No. 12 Arkansas 12 (1959)
After falling apart under Edwin Price in the mid-1950s, Texas righted the ship by hiring Royal, a former Oklahoma Sooner, to lead the program in 1957. In 1959 the Longhorns embarked on a run of nine top-10 finishes and two national titles in 14 years. Royal won his first two games against Arkansas by a combined 41-6, but second-year head coach Broyles also had things up and running by 1959. The Razorbacks would enjoy eight top-10 finishes in 11 years from 1959 to 1969; in this tight loss, they served notice as to what was coming.
As with much of 1950s college football, this game was decided by disasters. Both teams lost four fumbles; Arkansas recovered a loose ball to set up its first touchdown, but with Texas trailing 12-7 in the third quarter, another future Hall of Famer, Lance Alworth, muffed a punt, which set up a winning touchdown pass from Bart Shirley to Jack Collins. Between 1959 and 1969, eight of 11 Steers-Porkers games would be decided by five or fewer points.
No. 8 Arkansas 14, No. 1 Texas 13 (1964)
Texas won its first national title under Royal in 1963; the Longhorns shined in big games that season, beating No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 2 Navy by a combined 56-13, but they managed only a 17-13 win over Arkansas in Fayetteville. They advanced their winning streak to 15 games early in 1964, but Broyles was building a title-worthy squad of his own by then.
For the third time in four years, this was a matchup of top-10 teams. The most famous members of the 1964 Razorbacks were future Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and future college and NFL title winner Jimmy Johnson, but future Arkansas coach Ken Hatfield made the difference in this one. His 81-yard punt return gave Arkansas a 7-0 halftime lead, and after Texas tied the score in the fourth quarter, Fred Marshall found Bobby Crockett for a 34-yard touchdown to put Arkansas ahead once more. With about a minute left, Ernie Koy scored on a 1-yard plunge; Royal, entirely uninterested in a tie, elected to go for two points and the win, but a pass attempt came up short. Texas’ winning streak was over, and Arkansas would go on to finish 11-0 and score a share of its first national title.
No. 3 Arkansas 27, No. 1 Texas 24 (1965)
By October 1965, Arkansas had extended its winning streak to 16 games, winning its first four games of 1965 by a combined 114-33. But Texas had leapfrogged the Razorbacks to get back to No. 1, thanks in part to a 19-0 win over Oklahoma. That put the chip firmly back on Arkansas’ shoulder.
With the extra dose of motivation — plus, perhaps, some divine intervention: Fayetteville’s First Baptist Church famously posted, “Football is only a game, eternal things are spiritual. Nevertheless, beat Texas” that week — Arkansas raced to an early lead thanks to a pair of Phil Harris fumbles. Martine Bercher recovered the first one in the end zone, then Tommy Trantham took another one 77 yards for a score.
Arkansas went up 20-0 after a Jon Brittenum-to-Bobby Crockett touchdown, but Texas charged back. It was 20-11 by halftime, and David Conway’s 34-yard field goal made it 24-20 Longhorns with just five minutes left. Brittenum scored from a yard out with 1:32 remaining, though, and Arkansas had its second of three straight wins in the series.
The Hogs would run their overall winning streak to 22 before falling to LSU 14-7 in the Cotton Bowl.
No. 1 Texas 15, No. 2 Arkansas 14 (1969)
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? Texas usually played Oklahoma and Arkansas back-to-back in early October, but Roone Arledge, the innovative head of ABC Sports, had an idea in the offseason. Texas had finished 1968 as the hottest team in the country, winning its last nine games and averaging 37 points per game with offensive coordinator Emory Bellard’s innovative wishbone scheme. Arkansas, meanwhile, finished 10-1 with only a 39-29 loss at Texas. The Longhorns and Razorbacks finished third and sixth, respectively, in the AP poll and headed into 1969, college football’s centennial season, as obvious national title contenders.
According to Terry Frei’s “Horns, Hogs, and Nixon’s Coming,” ABC publicist (and future ESPN analyst) Beano Cook pored over the schedules and determined that Arkansas, Texas and Penn State all had good chances of going unbeaten. “My recommendation involved Penn State and Arkansas finishing the regular season with perfect records and then playing for the national title,” Cook told Frei. “I said we should move Texas-Arkansas to December 6, because I thought Texas might be undefeated then, too.” Arledge told the coaches that former Oklahoma coach and politician Bud Wilkinson could make sure that new President Richard Nixon was likely to attend the game as well. It was going to be a spectacle unlike anything college football had seen.
Sure enough, the Longhorns and Razorbacks both reached December unbeaten (as did Penn State), and Nixon was there in the stands for a game that somehow lived up to all expectations.
With Texas’ offense discombobulated early — the Horns turned the ball over on their first two drives — Arkansas scored on a short Bill Burnett run and, early in the third quarter, a 29-yard catch by star receiver Chuck Dicus. Texas quarterback James Street scored on the first play of the fourth quarter, then scored on a 2-point conversion as well. (Royal decided before the game that he once again wanted to avoid a tie at all costs.)
With the score 14-8, Arkansas drove the length of the field and was on the verge of putting the game away until Danny Lester picked off a Bill Montgomery pass in the end zone. Then came “Right 53 Veer Pass”: On a fourth-and-3 near midfield, Street threw a bomb to Randy Peschel for 44 yards.
#TBT – 1969: Texas defeats Arkansas 15-14.#ThisIsTexas #HookEm pic.twitter.com/xoqn5cbhFm
— Texas Football (@TexasFootball) October 17, 2019
Two plays later, Texas went ahead with a short Jim Bertelsen touchdown. Arkansas drove near field goal range in the final seconds, but Tom Campbell picked off Montgomery to ice the game, and Nixon declared Texas the national champion in the locker room after the game. (This rather annoyed Penn State’s Joe Paterno, whose team was also unbeaten.)
College football’s explosion as a television product can be ascribed to countless things, but ABC’s innovative approach to broadcasting, followed by a couple of all-time classics — this and 1971 Oklahoma-Nebraska, to name two — in short succession certainly didn’t hurt.
No. 1 Texas 42, No. 4 Arkansas 7 (1970)
The sequel often fails to live up to the billing. Almost exactly a year after the 1969 classic, Texas was riding a 29-game winning streak, while 9-1 Arkansas was ranked fourth in the AP poll and looking for revenge on national television. It didn’t quite work out.
Texas rushed for 464 yards — Bertelsen and Steve Worster combined for 315 on their own, with five of the Longhorns’ six touchdowns — and picked off Montgomery three times. After a goal-line stand by the Longhorns’ defense prevented Arkansas from tying the score early on, the floodgates opened.
The tide had again turned in the rivalry. Arkansas would finally get some measure of revenge the next year with a win in Little Rock, but after winning four of seven over the Horns between 1960-66, the Hogs won only once between 1966-79.
No. 8 Texas 28, No. 3 Arkansas 21 (1978)
A generation ended when both Royal and Broyles retired after matching 5-5-1 seasons in 1976. They both ended up hiring their younger replacements — 38-year old Fred Akers at UT, 40-year old Lou Holtz at Arkansas — as their schools’ respective athletic directors.
Both led immediate rebounds. Holtz won 30 games, Akers won 29, and both schools finished in the AP top 12 each year from 1977 to 1979. In 1978, Akers’ Longhorns played a unique role, too: spoiler. They welcomed unbeaten Arkansas to Austin and ended the Hogs’ 11-game winning streak. Two Randy McEachern touchdown passes in the final minute of the first half turned a tie into a 20-7 Texas lead, and when Arkansas charged back to take the lead, Johnny “Lam” Jones caught McEachern’s third TD pass, and Johnnie Johnson picked off one pass and broke up another on a fourth down to seal the win. This was the first of four straight upsets in the series, with the lower-ranked team winning every year from 1978 to 1981. My favorite rivalries are the ones that make no sense.
Arkansas 42, No. 1 Texas 11 (1981)
And now for maybe the most shocking result in the history of the rivalry. Akers’ Longhorns entered the 1981 game No. 1 in the country, having just blown out Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma 34-14 to move to 4-0. Arkansas, meanwhile, had fallen out of the AP rankings two weeks earlier after a road loss to an awful TCU team that would finish 2-7-2. Surely a blowout was in store, right?
This was indeed a blowout, but not the one anyone expected. Two fumbles and a safety from an airmailed punt snap gave Arkansas a quick 15-0 lead, and the Longhorns never got closer. The Hogs led 25-3 at halftime and 39-3 after three quarters; Texas actually outgained the home team 421-323, but seven turnovers sabotaged all efforts. A turnaround in the series? Not so much. The last two Akers-Holtz battles ended up a combined 64-10 in favor of the team in burnt orange. But this one was an awfully big thumb in the eye, and it would prevent the Horns from winning a national title — they ended up second in the polls behind Clemson.
Arkansas 14, Texas 13 (1991)
“Ain’t no rematch. Best thing of all, ain’t gonna be no rematch.” That’s Arkansas head coach Jack Crowe, celebrating a Hogs win in the final SWC matchup between the two rivals. He had just weathered one of the silliest games in the series to secure permanent (well, permanent-ish) bragging rights. Arkansas led 14-0 at halftime after touchdowns from Ron Dickerson Jr. and Kerwin Price, but a 14-yard Phil Brown touchdown made it 14-7 heading into the fourth quarter, and a 55-yard burst from Brown tied the score. Or at least, it should have: The Longhorns missed the PAT, then missed a 39-yard field goal attempt with 3:45 left.
The teams weren’t particularly memorable, even if the game was. Crowe’s Razorbacks went 6-6 in their last season in the SWC, while David McWilliams’ fifth and final Texas team went 5-6. The teams had weathered ups and downs, splitting the previous six meetings and producing zero top-10 finishes from 1984 to 1991 as the SWC wobbled through controversies and discontent. In 1990, the SEC announced it was adding Arkansas as part of an expansion to 10 teams; the plan had originally included adding not only the Hogs but also Texas and Texas A&M, but the state legislature intervened, and only Arkansas was on its way out the door. So was Crowe: Broyles fired him (and then tried to get away with announcing he’d resigned) after Arkansas began its SEC tenure with a 10-3 loss to The Citadel.
No. 7 Texas 22, Arkansas 20 (2004)
Since 1991, this has basically been a series of pent-up aggression: Whichever rival takes an early lead when they meet just keeps wailing away for a while. Arkansas won two bowl meetings (the 2000 Cotton Bowl and the 2014 Texas Bowl) by a combined 58-13, Texas won a home game in Austin 52-10 in 2008, and Arkansas won a home game in Fayetteville, Steve Sarkisian’s second game in charge at Texas, by a score of 40-21 in 2021.
A 2003-04 home-and-home series produced some drama, though. Arkansas upset No. 6 Texas by a 38-28 margin in 2003, using an early 21-0 run to build some space, getting 217 combined rushing yards from Cedric Cobbs and quarterback Matt Jones and scoring every time it needed to down the stretch.
But with a young quarterback by the name of Vince Young taking over for UT in 2004, the Longhorns got some revenge. Texas built a quick 9-0 advantage with a safety from a bombed punt snap and a 49-yard TD from Young to David Thomas. And from there, it was the Cedric Benson show: The star running back produced 201 yards from scrimmage and scored via both ground and air. Texas held a 22-17 lead into the fourth quarter, and after forcing an Arkansas field goal with 9:58 left, the Longhorns’ defense forced three consecutive turnovers to ice the win. Arkansas would stumble to a disappointing 5-6 record, while Mack Brown’s Longhorns would finish 11-1 before winning the national title a year later.
The most recent Hogs-Horns game might turn out to have been pretty useful. “I don’t know what Darrell Royal did to Arkansas back in the day,” Sarkisian joked with reporters this week, “but they absolutely hate our guts. And I think we learned that the first time around when we went there.”
Texas knows what it’s walking into, at least. They know to expect a Horns Down or two, though we’ll have to wait and see if Sam Pittman gets in on the act.
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