Almost 34 years ago, a friend and former coworker at the Southwest Times Record in Fort Smith, Ark., hit me up with a request.
Patti had left the paper to become editor of a new local magazine called Fort Smith Etc. She asked me to write an article on the University of Arkansas’ stunning move from the now late Southwest Conference to the the rival Southeast Conference.
Arkansas announced in August 1990 that it was switching conferences, and actually made the move the following year.
The unexpected conference divorce set off shockwaves among major conferences and ushered in what has become an era of constant realignment. By 1995, the SWC was no more, with most members welcomed into the Big Eight, now known as the Big 12.
Anyway, I wrote a pretty snarky — for me — 800-word piece for the magazine that listed all the things the Razorbacks would not miss from the SWC. It was published in the Nov./Dec. 1991 edition of Fort Smith Etc. magazine.
So, why am I writing about this now when I hadn’t given the article a thought for the last 30 years or so?
Turns out a high school friend of mine and Fort Smith native I’ll call ‘Will’ discovered he had digitized copy of the article on his personal computer. Will, who also had written for the magazine, emailed it to me. Thanks, Will!
After reading what I wrote more than three decades ago, I’m still proud of how it turned out and the fact that it is still relevant today in this era of conference reshuffling.
There are a couple of references to now departed venues like Barnhill and Reunion arenas (and misplaced campus locations for the universities of Alabama and Mississippi), but it’s not too dated, I think.
With all that said, I’m reprinting the article here in BlogOKC. Hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane.
Signed, sealed & delivered to the SEC
Mac Davis, the curly-haired crooner with the West Texas drawl, probably said it best for University of Arkansas fans when he sang something like “Happiness is the state of Texas in my rear view mirror.”
That was the theme when 10,000 or so Hog-callers began their final caravan across the Red River and out of the Lone State after the Southwest Conference basketball tournament last March. The Razorbacks had bid adieu to their SWC step-brothers with an astounding thrashing of the Texas Longhorns for the tournament championship, and along with the Razorback women’s team, hauled away every basketball prize the league had to offer.
When it was over, they called the Hogs in Dallas one final time, took the “Barnhill South” sign down from in front of Reunion Arena and began the pilgrimage back to the Ozarks. The last one out should have stopped and burned the bridge that spanned the Red River.
Without a glance in the rear view mirror, Razorback basketball fans got out the map and charted Knoxville and Birmingham and Jackson and all the Southeast Conference stops in between. The SEC, a conference that already featured teams in seven states, threw open the doors to Arkansas with a great big “Welcome.”
In Texas, the resentment of any Arkansas’ SWC success ran deep in such holes-in-the-prairie as Waco and Lubbock. The Razorbacks own a legacy of SWC success that can’t be exorcised from the conference record book. You can look it up.
Nevertheless, despite 76 years of SWC membership (Arkansas was a charter member), Arkansas forever remained an outsider who annually crashed a party that should have been a Texas-only affair.
Well, it is now. The SWC is reduced to eight Texas schools, any six of whom would be welcomed this very minute into the Trans-America Conference or the American South.
If there were any tears, they were those shed by Dallas merchants, who may have been the only people inTexas who realized from where the success of the SWC basketball tournament came.
Arkansas now has been signed, sealed and delivered to the Southeast Conference and there should be no nostalgic or sympathetic thoughts for the conference left behind in Texas.
Unsure? I offer ten reasons never to never look back at the SWC:
1. Average attendance at SouthwestConference basketball games in 1990-91 was 3,963. The SEC averaged 11,585.
2. Mississippi, with an average of 3,949, was the Southeast Conference’s poorest draw in basketball in 1990-’91. Texas Tech (2,465), TCU (3,868), SMU (2,938), Rice (2,873) and Houston (3,387) all had lower attendance averages.
3. Average attendance at Southwest Conference football games in 1990 was 39,382. The SEC averaged 63,870.
4. Southwest Conference teams were forced to play a limited football schedule for two seasons because one conference member, SMU, was given the “death penalty” by the NCAA; no SEC school has ever drawn the “death penalty.”
5. The Cotton Bowl is played in an open-air stadium, often in some of the most brutal weather Texas has to offer on New Year’s Day; the Sugar Bowl, played in the New Orleans SuperDome, is never threatened by the weather.
6. Southeast Conference football games are broadcast nationally over the Turner Broadcasting System cable network. SWC games are broadcast throughout Texas on something known as the “Raycom Sports Network.”
7. Arkansas will never have to face Southwest Conference officials when playing a Southeastern Conference game.
8. Texas A&M, a school full of traditions, features an all-male corps of cheerleaders.
9. There is no horror movie titled “The Tennessee Chainsaw Massacre”
10. Few natives from any Southeastern Conference state answer to the name of “Tex.”
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