FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – It still is a little strange when I come here to think of Arkansas being a member of the Southwest Conference, which they were for 76 years.
The Razorbacks’ best years in football were when they played in the old SWC, where they were a member from l914 to 1991. It was Frank Broyles who orchestrated the move to the SEC. The Razorbacks won 13 football titles in the old SWC, with Broyles winning seven of those championships.
Broyles, a native of Decatur and a graduate of Georgia Tech, had a reputation for being a coach who would promote his assistants for head coaching positions.
More than 25 of his former assistants landed head jobs in college coaching, and two—Raymond Berry (New England Patriots) and Joe Gibbs (Washington Redskins)—wound up as head coaches in the NFL. Two former Georgia assistants who coached under Broyles and became head coaches were Billy Kinard (Ole Miss) and Bill Pace (Vanderbilt).
Headlining the “Broyles list” were Barry Switzer, Jimmy Johnson, Johnny Majors, Hayden Fry, Doug Dickey, and Danny Ford.
You may remember when Joe Kines was interim head coach at Arkansas in 1992? The head coach that season was Jack Crowe, but Arkansas lost its opening game to The Citadel, which prompted Broyles to fire Crowe and give the job to Kines, albeit on an interim basis.
Kines, who was the defensive coordinator, needed to replace himself. He reached out to his old friend Danny Ford who had resigned at Clemson a couple of years prior.
When Georgia played Arkansas in Fayetteville in 1992, Ray Goff was in his fourth year and would enjoy his best season with the Bulldogs. Friday night before the game, which Georgia won without a lot of stress, Broyles had several of us over to his house for dinner.
He and I spent time talking about the Masters since he was a member of Augusta National and played a lot of golf. When the topic turned to football, he said, “You know Danny Ford really has a head coach’s presence.” Ford’s success at Clemson, where the Tigers won a national title in 1981, had gotten Broyles’s attention, and Ford also had gotten Broyles’s attention.
I thought privately that Joe Kines, a fine football coach, was likely not going to get the Razorback job at the end of the season, which is the way things turned out. Goff hired him at Georgia and came to appreciate him as a coach and wished that he had gotten a head coaching opportunity. I believe if he had gotten a good job, he would have developed a winning program.
Broyles owned the state of Arkansas when he became entrenched in Fayetteville. He worked for nine years with Georgian Keith Jackson on the ABC weekly broadcast of college football, two Georgia boys spreading the good word of the greatest of games, which we seem to be headed to destroying.
In September 1982, ABC executives called Vice Dooley and set in motion a plan to have Clemson and Georgia playing before the nation in a matchup of the last two national champions of 1980 and 1981.
Boy, was that a blockbuster pairing. Keith and Broyles were as excited as I have ever seen them, and ABC went all out to showcase their best talent.
In addition to the play-by-play announcer and the color commentator, they sent Jack Whitaker and Jim Lampley to pitch in, and nobody enjoyed being in Athens more than Whitaker, an erudite essayist who loved the Lumpkin Street scene with the comingling of students and fans (both schools) and the pageantry.
They all had dinner at our house, and following dinner, they all gathered on our back porch for conversation. I have never heard greater story telling by any group of sports celebrities. We did not want the evening to end.
“Whoa Nellie.”
