Horrible decision for OSU football. Another reason OSU owes them.
Berry Tramel: How Frank Broyles and Henry Iba conspired to doom Oklahoma State football
- Sep 4, 2024 Updated 1 hr ago
Berry Tramel
Sports ColumnistSTILLWATER — A Henry Iba fishing hole. A wink-wink agreement between two giants in the history of intercollegiate athletics. A pawn in the sordid history of segregated sports in the South.
Who knows what all conspired to so kookily construct the OSU-Arkansas football series? All of the decision-makers from those days are gone. It’s been 44 years since the Cowboys and Razorbacks shared a football field, but that changes Saturday at Boone Pickens Stadium, when what seems like a natural rivalry is renewed for the first time since Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Walter Cronkite was in the CBS anchor chair and Carl Yastrzemski was in the Red Sox lineup.
In those 44 years, college football’s business side has changed more than its gridiron side. What occurred with OSU-Arkansas never would happen today.
From 1950 through 1980, the Cowboys and Razorbacks staged 28 football games together. Three were in Stillwater; 25 were in Little Rock, the Arkansas capital and the Hogs’ second home.
For three decades, the OSU athletic department sacrificed its football program for, well, we’re not exactly sure what. We think we know. It’s money, right? It’s always money.
But still. How could it have made any sense — or dollars and cents — to play a road game almost every season against a border-state rival for three decades?
“Inconceivable,” says OSU athletic director Chad Weiberg.
“Embarrassing,” says Mike Gundy.
Now the rivalry renews, in Stillwater, to boot. What a novel concept.
This is a natural series. Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Stillwater are 186 miles apart; that makes OSU the closest major-college football program to the Razorbacks by proximity.
And the programs once thought it wise to play each other. From 1912 through 1946, they met 16 times, with the Cowboys holding a 8-7-1 edge. Six of those games were in Stillwater, five in Fayetteville, four in Fort Smith and one in Oklahoma City.
Then came the 30-year mystery. How could any self-respecting athletic department with the tradition of OSU, stationed in the prestigious Big Eight Conference for two of those three decades, forfeit an even playing field by agreeing to road games almost every year against the same opponent?
Former OSU athletic director Terry Don Phillips — a Razorback player and administrator before coming to Stillwater — was appalled at the history of the series. During his days as AD (1995-2002), Phillips researched the history of OSU football scheduling and was dismayed at the plight of those Cowboys.
“That was way before my time, so I have no idea what the calculation that went into that, but certainly something that’s inconceivable today,” Weiberg said.
Iba clearly did not prioritize OSU football success. People in Payne County would drink cyanide before saying something bad about Hank Iba, but the truth’s the truth.
A couple of things to remember from those days:
- OSU was not terribly successful in football and didn’t consistently draw well. Crowds fewer than 30,000 were common in the 1950s and 1960s.
- Arkansas split its home games between Fayetteville and Little Rock, and both locales wanted as many games as possible, creating a demand for non-conference home games. In the 1960s, the Razorbacks played 29 non-conference games. Only one was not in Fayetteville or Little Rock.
- Iba, the legendary basketball coach who also served as OSU’s athletic director from 1935-70, faced constant budget demands and basically helped fund the department with a preponderance of road games.
The result was a one-sided OSU-Arkansas series, even though the programs themselves were fairly equitable through most of the 1950s; from 1950-58, the Razorbacks of the Southwest Conference were 41-49-1, while the Cowboys of the independent ranks and the Missouri Valley were 41-45-5.
But Arkansas dominated the series. After OSU’s 1953 victory, the Razorbacks won 14 of 15 in the rivalry, and Arkansas became a national powerhouse in the ‘60s, with a top-10 finish in The Associated Press eight times from 1959-69.
The Razorback rise coincided, of course, with the 1957 hiring of Frank Broyles, who became an Arkansas icon as football coach (1957-76) and athletic director (1974-2007). Broyles was a great coach and a shrewd administrator.
OSU had been to Little Rock three straight years when Broyles got to the Ozarks, but he quickly signed up the Cowboys to keep coming every year.
“Broyles took him (Iba) to the cleaners,” Gundy said. “‘Cause Broyles said, ‘I’m trying to win in football, you’re trying to win in basketball. We’ll make a deal. Iba’s like, ‘I don’t give a s*** if football wins.’ That’s probably what happened.”
An old story, probably apocryphal, around Stillwater says Iba had a favorite fishing spot outside Little Rock, so he signed up OSU to play Arkansas every year at War Memorial Stadium.
But Iba had other reasons to make Little Rock an annual Cowboy stop, notably that the Razorbacks paid visitors well to keep coming to Arkansas.
“With Coach Broyles, the guarantee was always so good, Oklahoma State couldn’t turn it down,” said Rick Schaeffer, a Putnam City High School and OSU graduate who worked on the Cowboy sports information staff in the 1970s but who went on to be the 24-year sports information director at Arkansas, a Razorback football historian and still a member of the Arkansas radio crew.
Eventually, after Iba no longer was athletic director, OSU wised up and persuaded the Razorbacks to head west.
On September 13, 1975, the 16th-ranked Hogs came to old Lewis Field; OSU won 20-13, its third straight victory in the rivalry. Arkansas came back in 1978 and won 19-7.
By then Broyles was growing tired of the series. OSU was much more competitive, wanted home games and, oh yeah, the Cowboys had been recruiting well in Arkansas.
Black linemen such as John Little, Philip Dokes and James “Duck” White became stars after crossing the state line to become Cowboys. OSU was more than a decade ahead of Arkansas in college football integration.
“That stimulated things,” Schaeffer said. “Arkansas might have thought, ‘If we keep playing them in Little Rock, they’re going to keep coming in and getting players.’”
OSU eventually righted its schedules, with more home-and-home contracts. The Cowboys occasionally played single-game opponents for a paycheck — Ohio State, Michigan, Florida — but that, too, has gone away.
Now, Alabama, Oregon and Nebraska are on the docket to play in Stillwater.
Arkansas continued to hoard home games but in recent years is playing a more conventional schedule. The Razorbacks have had home-and-home series with Texas, Brigham Young, Texas Christian and Texas Tech, with Notre Dame and Utah upcoming.
There’s even another OSU-Arkansas set. The Cowboys play at Fayetteville in 2027, then the old foes have a series in 2032-33, with Game 1 in Stillwater, Game 2 in the hills.
Heck, maybe even Gundy still will be coaching. He still shakes his head over what happened to predecessors like Cliff Speegle and Phil Cutchin and Floyd Gass. Coaches who saw a lot of Little Rock but never saw the Razorbacks in Stillwater.
“They got sold out,” Gundy said. “That’s a crying shame.”
