Dribbling Ink

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...

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...