Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Texas A&M wants to replace its annual Thanksgiving weekend game against Texas with new Southeastern Conference rival LSU. The SEC appears to want that marquee Thanksgiving weekend matchup as well. All that was lacking was LSU's OK, and it was believed among Tiger insiders that LSU preferred to keep Arkansas as its regular season finale. Now, however, LSU athletic director Joe Alleva has spoken out and seems to prefer that the Tigers now play A&M in the date where LSU and Arkansas have met for 20 years.

Alleva told the Baton Rouge Daily Advocate at the SEC meetings in Destin, Fla., that the Tigers and Aggies likely will start playing at the end of the season beginning in 2014.

It's then expected that Arkansas would see its matchup with LSU move to October. Presumably, Arkansas' season-ending foe could become Missouri, which if the league's scheduling plans proceed will have the Hogs and Mizzou Tigers as West-East yearly rivals.

LSU's and Texas A&M's campuses are within five hours of each other, and the teams had a bitter early-season rivalry as nonconference foes that ran from the 1950s to the mid-1990s, before LSU ended the series. The Tigers dominated the matchup in the 1960s through the mid-1980s.

Texas chose to end its hundred-year rivalry with A&M, effective immediately, when the Aggies moved to the SEC last summer.

A&M appears to be reaping the SEC's goodwill at Arkansas' expense. The Aggies are expected to take over as the annual interdivision rival of South Carolina beginning next season. Arkansas and South Carolina were matched as annual rivals when both began competing for the SEC football championship in 1992. Arkansas holds a 13-7 alltime edge over South Carolina.

Now, it appears the Aggies and the vast number of TV sets in Texas are more important to the SEC than Arkansas' recent rivalry with LSU, which has been nationally televised by CBS for six of the past seven years and is again set for a Friday telecast this fall.

The Arkansas-LSU game led to the creation of "The Golden Boot," a huge gold-plated trophy in the shape of both states that goes to that year's winner. Even in the 1950s, when Arkansas was a member of the Southwest Conference and before Texas Tech was admitted to the SWC and became the Hogs' regular-season finale, Arkansas and LSU met at season's end, often in Shreveport.