Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

12/26/2011 at 3:25pm

Image by Mark Wagner

Bobby Petrino is a 'scoop and score' away from being 2-0 in bowl games at Arkansas.

If Arkansas manages to beat Kansas State in the AT&T Cotton Bowl on Jan. 6, the Razorback football program will still need 10 additional wins in a row to reach a .500 win percentage in bowl game victories.

Such a statistic standing 12-23-3 all-time in post-season bowls — is unheard of not just among among the college football elite, but for anyone fancying themselves as a Top 25 power.

And we all know how much Arkansas’ fans want to believe the Razorbacks are if not yet among the at least returning to a national stature last enjoyed more than a generation ago.

At one point, the Razorback program stood 8-9-3 all time in bowls, a reasonable mark for post-season participation. The program reached that mark in 1982, when Arkansas hit the end of an amazing run of national success beginning with Frank Broyles’ hiring in 1958. Lou Holtz took Broyles’ recruits in 1977, achieved Arkansas’ greatest bowl upset in a 31-6 Orange Bowl trashing of Oklahoma, and kept the program in Top 10 status through a 28-24 win over Florida (the ONLY Arkansas win over the Gators) in the 1982 Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl.

Holtz was 3-2-1 in bowls: Between the mighty upset of then No. 2 Oklahoma on Jan. 2, 1978 and the comeback win over a loaded Florida on Dec. 31, 1982 in Houston, his teams tied UCLA 10-10 in 1978’s Fiesta Bowl with his preseason national title contender; lost 24-9 to Bear Bryant’s greatest Alabama team in the 1980 Sugar Bowl; crushed an outmanned Tulane 34-15 in Birmingham’s Hall of Fame Bowl, and his most up-and-down team was fogged out by a talented North Carolina 31-27 in the 1981 Gator Bowl.

That 1977-82 run (Holtz could not get his last Hog team into a bowl with a 6-5 mark and he was let go in December after claiming to be “burned out”) was the nadir of Arkansas bowl successes, even better than what Broyles managed (4-6).

The thought is, two fairly evenly matched teams are invited to a post-season matchup, and all things being equal, over the course of time one program’s record should be fairly close to .500.

You win some and you lose some, in other words.

Even a program that is not among the college football elite, but one that reaches a bowl on a regular basis, would still figure to be matched against similar competition and somehow break even in the wins and loss.

For Arkansas in the past 29 years, it’s been more of a “win one, then lose several” when it comes to bowls. The Hogs are a woeful 4-14.

And, in an era in which more that half of all Division I teams reach bowl games, Arkansas has missed bowls in 10 seasons, including a run of three straight years in 1992-94 and two years in 1996-97, with four of those seasons under Danny Ford.

Ken Hatfield’s Hogs never missed a bowl game but also went 1-5. Houston Nutt failed to advance his program to a bowl game in 2004-05 and in his seven trips, his teams went 2-5. Interim coach Reggie Herring laid a Cotton Bowl egg without Nutt around in 2007.

Bobby Petrino has now taken his Hogs to bowl games in three of his four years, with a 1-1 mark, a last-minute scoop-and-score after a blocked punt in last year’s Sugar Bowl against Ohio State from 2-0. Arkansas was more evenly matched with East Carolina that many fans expected in 2009’s Liberty Bowl and was fortunate (thanks to ECU’s kicking woes) to win an overtime game.

So now, we come to this season’s Cotton Bowl, where the BCS standings reveal about as even a bowl matchup as any — next to the national championship game between LSU and Alabama — in No. 6 Arkansas and No. 8 Kansas State.

Amazingly, another Hog bowl defeat and the all-time win percentage hits .333.

We’re not certain the fan base can cotton to such a result.

Surely a defeat to a barely-better-than-middling’ Big 12 team with leave a lot worse taste in Razorback fans’ mouths than the 31-26 Sugar Bowl loss to Ohio State did last year.

That setback left Arkansas with a 10-3 mark, the best record (by percentage) for the Hogs in 21 years.

Arkansas has already reached back-to-back 10-win seasons for the first time in 22 years, but another 10-3 record after Jan. 6 will be a bigger setback for Petrino’s program than simply yet another Hog bowl loss.

This 2011 edition of the Hogs needs a high-stature win over a top 10 team away from Fayetteville. The best victory this year for this club was outscoring South Carolina 44-28 at Reynolds Razorback Stadium.

Arkansas caught South Carolina without Marcus Lattimore (though the Gamecocks found a running game from two backups over all but the Razorbacks matchup down the stretch). The rest of the SEC, with the exceptions of LSU and Alabama, was well below par.

Not to condemn a rare 10-win Arkansas season — only the 10th in program history, but unless the Hogs beat Kansas State to finish on an upbeat, this team could easily be considered the worst 10-win team in program history.

Moreover, writing that sounds very harsh. It seems unfair to link “worst” with a “10-win team.” Let’s just say, then, that this squad could be the least best among Arkansas’ all-time 10-win teams, slightly trailing the 2006 team that lost four out of five games that really mattered that season. At least that team had a 27-10 road romp over a then No. 2 Auburn team that would only lose twice all year.

If this Arkansas team truly is among the top 5, it will handle the Kansas State Wildcats with its advantage in speed on offense, the defense under new coordinator Paul Haynes will make enough plays to short-circuit some Wildcats series, and the kicking game won’t botch its opportunities or shift momentum the other way.

A win will help the fan base forget the trouncing at the hands of the two best teams in the country, and the returning players will enter off-season and spring practice on the upswing, knowing at BCS Championship Game spot isn’t as far off as many might think.

Give another bowl game away, and Arkansas falls to 12-24-3 all time, which puts the Razorbacks in strange bowl company with Minnesota and New Mexico. It will further the perception that Arkansas has always overachieved as a football program, only to be once again overmatched in a bowl game, with only a few rare exceptions. That’s the best way to explain how the Hogs are so one-sidedly on the losing end in its all-time bowl record.

As bad as Razorback fans want to hear it, based on the numbers, the perception of the program and its reality are the same.

Tagged: Florida Gators, Fiesta Bowl, Arkansas Razorbacks , Jim Harris, Bobby Petrino, Kansas State Wildcats