Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

All this fan excitement and hoopla surrounding Bobby Petrino's third Arkansas Razorback football team, and the Hogs still couldn't rate any higher than No. 17 in the Associated Press' preseason Top 25, released Saturday.

If it's any consolation to these Hogs, who publicly have announced high hopes for themselves, it's the best preseason ranking Arkansas has managed in 20 years.

Twenty years. Lot has happened in 20 years. Bill Clinton was still governor 20 years ago. The masses didn't have e-mail or the Internet, and bulky TVs ate up a lot of room in the den. CDs were the "in" thing in music, iTunes nothing but some computer geek's dream. When it was scorching hot, nobody blamed global warming.

In 1990, Arkansas placed No. 14 in the AP preseason poll. Following back-to-back 10-win season and a pair of Cotton Bowl losses, with some talented offensive players returning, the ranking probably made sense that August to the AP voters across the nation, most of whom didn't know that much about the inner workings of the Razorback football program. The Southwest Conference media who toured every site in the conference that summer, interviewing players and coaches and in theory comparing the teams by seeing them in person, ended up picking Arkansas to finish third in the conference, same as they'd done "on paper" weeks earlier.

If you're older than 30 and have always followed the Razorbacks, surely you remember 1990. Arkansas was beginning the Jack Crowe era, Crowe having been promoted from offensive coordinator to head coach the day Razorback playing legend Ken Hatfield, having won 75 percent of his games as a Hog coach, left after six seasons in Fayetteville to take the Clemson job. The Razorbacks didn't appear to miss a beat at the start of that season, whipping Tulsa and running all up and down the field on Ole Miss in a day game in Little Rock. But when Ron Dickerson was tackled at the Rebels 1-yard line on the game's final play, and Ole Miss won 21-17, the bottom seemed to fall out of Arkansas football, not just for the 1990 but for several years.

Arkansas, rebounding from the shock of blowing the Ole Miss game, struggled to beat Colorado State in Little Rock. Then TCU blocked two punts for scores and hung 54 points on the Hogs with a run-and-shoot offense, and it seemed the Razorback program spent the next several weeks in a state of shock. SMU, in just its second year back from the NCAA's death penalty, was the antidote to a seven-game losing streak, and Arkansas finished 3-8.

The national media in the summer of 1990 did not seem to realize that Hatfield's 1989 team had a defense held together by string, and that string broke under confused coordination when Crowe took charge. Plus, two-time SWC title-winning quarterback Quinn Grovey had to run for his life behind a rebuilt O-line in '90. It was obvious the talent level across the board had tumbled from the 1988 level, when Arkansas reached the season finale with Miami 10-0 and lost that road game 18-16 in the final minutes.

To give Crowe a little credit, he had Arkansas competing for an SWC title in 1991 late in the season, and he beat Texas in Little Rock. However, the SWC- was a shell of old 1960s-70s-early 80s-self by now.

The Citadel loss, 10-3, to start 1992 alerted to the country how far Arkansas had fallen, and so suddenly at that. With the season also being Arkansas' first to compete in the SEC only magnified matters. Five years under Danny Ford offered a handful of highlights and a surprising SEC West title in 1995, but three of Ford's seasons ended in 4-7 records. And, as Houston Nutt quickly pointed out when he got the job in December 1997, Arkansas could no longer beat the post-death-penalty SMU.

Nutt's 10-year roller-coaster ride never allowed Arkansas to gain traction as an SEC and national contender. His best seasons were his first, a 9-3 record in which Arkansas was 8-0, lost a heartbreaker to Tennessee and stayed in the Top 10, then gave away the following week's game at Mississippi State on a last-play field goal; and his 2006 season, when he was supposed to be on the hot seat. Arkansas reached 10-1 that year, then lost three straight close games to top 5 teams LSU, Florida and Wisconsin. When Nutt had his highest ranking, at No. 7 after a 4-0 start in 2003 (including a pasting of Texas on the road), his Hogs laid back-to-back eggs in Fayetteville against struggling Auburn and Ron Zook-coached Florida, and eventually tumbled out of the polls.

Nutt never succeeded when much was expected, as Ole Miss fans learned last year. His second team, in 1999, was had a Top 25 preseason ranking but lost four road games, three by humiliating fashion. Impressive wins over Tennessee and Texas in the Cotton Bowl were hardly noticed because of the four losses. And his 2007 team, following up his job-saving 2006 season, underachieved all the way the up to the season-finale in Baton Rouge, when the Hogs handed eventual national champion LSU a shocking 50-48 three-overtime loss. That unbelievable finish summed up a decade under Nutt.

Now that Bobby Petrino has had some time to build his program, to take the remnants of what Nutt left in 2008 and create what many people expect to be an offensive juggernaut in 2010, we seem to have come full circle from 1990. All those false starts, all those times when then-athletic director Frank Broyles proclaimed "the RAY-zorbacks ah back!" after out-of-nowhere wins at Tennessee (25-24, 1992) or Texas (38-28, Austin) and the like, now Petrino has a team that passes the SEC eye test. Whether it will pass the gauntlet of Saturdays in the league will be realized quickly in Athens, Ga., and then at home against AP No. 1 Alabama in September.