Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Arkansas' first trip to College Station, Texas, in 21 years takes us down memory lane to our own first visit to Aggieland.

Arkansas still wasn’t certain what kind of team it had in 1977, having been edge by Texas 13-9 in Fayetteville a few weeks earlier, when the Hogs went in to face the Southwest Conference preseason pick A&M, on Nov. 12. The Aggies had been embarrassed earlier in the year in a national TV game at Michigan, 41-3, but had played well since.

Kyle Field held a little more than 50,000 fans in a stadium that had just the single upper decks above the lower bowl. I was in college and the lucky beneficiary of my boss, Pine Bluff Commercial sports editor Frank Lightfoot, having landed a couple of seats on a private plane leaving out of Grider Field that Saturday morning. Though I had little clue how to work a real black-and-white Nikon newspaper camera and didn't sport the big, fancy lenses of the experts, I’d be going as the Commercial’s photographer.

Needless to say, I wouldn’t be good enough to get the iconic photo that day, the one that ran the following Sunday morning in the Arkansas Gazette, of Robert Farrell’s fingertip grab down the left sideline, in front of the Aggies, of Ron Calcagni’s 58-yard bomb to break a 20-20 tie with less than two minutes to play. Lou Holtz had suckered the Aggies with his veer running game, and the play action set up one of the biggest scores in Razorback football history.

Arkansas’ defense would survive a dash down the field by A&M quarterback David Walker, with defensive linemen Jimmy Walker and Dan Hampton forcing Walker into a bad pass near the goal line as the final seconds were winding down.

Arkansas wouldn’t lose at all the rest of that season, making the historic trip to the Orange Bowl to stun No. 2 Oklahoma.

What I remember, being on the sidelines all afternoon in Kyle Field, was how amazingly and thunderously loud 50,000 Aggie fans could sound.

More than a generation later, Kyle Field holds more than 83,000 fans, and the Bryan (Texas) Eagle reported earlier this week that A&M has a $450 million stadium expansion in the works to bring capacity over 100,000.

Remember, too, that Arkansas’ home-away-from-home at Little Rock back then held basically what it still does today, a little more than 53,000, while Razorback Stadium would be boosted from the 43,000 it managed in 1977 to 51,000 in 1985, and then to the current 72,000 capacity (give or take the hundreds they can cram into the temporary bleachers atop the south end zone) in Fayetteville now.

A&M is already among the top seven stadiums in capacity in the SEC and will join Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia in the six-figure range in coming years. It’s doubtful LSU or Florida will lag too much behind them, and Auburn won’t sit pat with an 87,000 capacity at Jordan-Hare. South Carolina likely will remain in the high 80,000s for the time being.

Then, you’ll have Arkansas, Missouri and Kentucky in the low 70,000s-high 60,000s, followed by the two Mississippi schools in the low 60,000s and Vanderbilt in the 50,000s.

That sounds awfully like the pecking order of the league when it comes to football.