Dribbling Ink

(My wife and brother-in-law carved this. I don't touch the inside of pumpkins.) (I'm not big on Halloween, but I enjoy autumn. We planted four  mums to celebrate.) (I made a homemade chocolate chip pizza. Too bad I can't serve this to trick-or-treaters.)

Arkansas football has bottomed out for 2012. After a last-second 30-27 loss at the hands of the Ole Miss Rebels—the perennial whipping dogs of the SEC West—the Razorbacks truly can’t achieve a lower level of ineptitude this season. Of course, Jeff Long could always rehire John L. Smith as the next head coach. Anyway, let’s just get right to the good part. Ten observations from the Arkansas-Ole Miss game at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, Arkansas: 10. The music selection still sucks. Apparently so do the speakers now. Except for “Go DJ” when Dennis Johnson was about to return a kickoff, which is almost too easy to even be considered clever, the music was predictably outdated and lifeless. Might as well play “Cotton-Eye Joe.” 9. None of the technology at WMS is ever checked before the game. I have never been to a game in Little Rock in which everything worked properly. This time the video board was glitching the entire time and, predictably—there’s that word again—there...

Bye weeks are fickle monsters. A week that should be neutral in theory never quite works that way. The bye week always creates collateral damage. Sometimes the fallout helps your team and sometimes it hurts your team. That’s because college football is dynamic—everything changes from week to week, which is why the BCS will continue to thrive no matter how many playoff games are added at the end of the season. Bye weeks also provide clarity. When the hectic race from fall camp to the beginning of the season to winning or losing games finally reaches a respite, players, coaches, and fans get a chance to reflect on months of preparation, expectations, and execution. Thus, after a week of washing my hands of Arkansas’s dreadful start to 2012 and watching other SEC teams more closely, I had an epiphany: Arka-Tenne-Burn-y. What is Arka-Tenne-Burn-y? Exactly what it sounds like: the shared state of four programs—Arkansas, Tennessee, Auburn, and Kentucky—that aren’t as different as their f...

(Photo by Wesley Hitt/Getty Images) It’s finally that week, the one that rolls around once a season in college and professional football: the bye week. Coming off a 49-7 beat down of Kentucky, the Arkansas Razorbacks have a free week to get healthy and prepare for a critical stretch of games. (If the Hogs want to salvage 2012, they have to win their next two games against Ole Miss and Tulsa. Assuming they win those games, the Hogs would have to beat one of three top-12 ranked teams remaining on the schedule—at #7 South Carolina, at #12 Mississippi State, and home against #6 LSU—to be bowl eligible.) Usually during bye weeks I pay special attention to my secondary team, Arkansas State. This year, however, provides Arkansans with a special twist: the dreaded double-bye weekend. A quick thought: Maybe ASU should schedule a game at War Memorial during Arkansas’s bye week each year. I’m not trying to be facetious; I actually think this is a good idea. There are a lot of football f...

With the Razorbacks searching for their next head football coach, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about the positives and negatives of the state of Arkansas. It’s an often-cited fact that Arkansas doesn’t have a professional sports team, which makes the Razorbacks the state’s pro team by default and consequently increases the attractiveness of the football head coaching position. (I don’t think there’s any question that Arkansas would struggle to support a professional sports team—the population just isn’t large enough. I think there would be a core of rabid fans, but not enough casual fans to make a consistent profit. And professional sports teams are all about the money.) This led me to consider an important question: If the state of Arkansas had to vote on which professional sports team to adopt as its own, which team would Arkansans pick? Regional proximity was one of the most important aspects I considered, so I included how many miles each team is from Little Rock...

(Caption: Arkansas pwns LSU. This is the best caption. Ever. And it defeats the entire purpose of this blog.) Sports, literature, Arkansas. These are the supposed topics of this blog. I've got the sports covered; however, I'm slacking in my literature and Arkansas material. (I have fiction to post, but I still get nervous about posting my creative writing). I guess you could consider the Conversations as concerning Arkansas since everyone I've interviewed is from the Natural State (minus the imaginary conversations). Still, seeing as Dribbling Ink is the most followed blog concerning Arkansas (or at least pretending to be) on Networked Blogs, I feel I should write a blog about Arkansas -- or at least make an attempt to. Yeah, I am kind of a big deal in Arkansas, moving in on Scottie Pippen, Corliss Williamson, and Bill Clinton territory. Note: I started this blog on Monday...it's now early Friday morning. Needless to say the flow is gone, but the links are still r...