FAYETTEVILLE - There was just the normal traffic flow on Razorback Road.
Past The Gardens, where the available-for-rent gazebos sit providing shade on a hot, clear July afternoon, you drive up the hill toward Reynolds Razorbacks Stadium.
Suddenly, there it is.
The new football center.
Shiny, with lots of glass, it is obvious the remaining work is finishing touches inside where the air conditioning saves the workers from a 90-degree day.
The facility is beautiful, and it was much needed.
Inside the Broyles Complex in the north end zone, several families are taking in the football museum that has been updated with displays of D.J. Williams and Jonathan Luigs, as well as the most recent bowl games.
There are no pictures of Bobby Petrino, but one can only guess that’s fine with him. He’s moved on to Western Kentucky and will endure his first Sun Belt Media Days which begins Monday.
Most of the football exhibits are faded, but still presentable, just like with Bud Walton Arena’s museum, which hasn’t needed to be updated much the past decade as the program has slipped further and harder than anyone could have imagined.
Basketball might be about to turn a small corner. Sometimes there really is addition by subtraction.
This trip, though, is about football and the lull before the storm.
New Coach Bret Bielema will be one of 14 coaches in Birmingham, Ala., this week as the SEC Media Days kicks off football.
Granted, it is premature since it is still more than two weeks until practice starts.
Snippets of conversations can be heard as the families make their way through the museum.
A little girl asks if this is where the Razorbacks still play their football games.
“It better be,” her dad said softly.
There is some optimism for this season, but how could there not be after the major disappointment of last season when hopes and dreams of a BCS National Championship disappeared with a loss to Louisiana Monroe.
The season seemed about as coordinated as a dead horse on roller skates.
Yet, there should also be a dose of reality with the optimism. A lot of key players were lost.
One young boy of about 10 asked who Frank Broyles was and why his picture was in the museum so much.
It was explained that when Broyles came to Arkansas as the head coach, the Razorbacks had a losing record in Southwest Conference play, but he changed all that and made them a contender more years than not.
And that he built most of the facilities.
“Is that why there’s a statue of him in front?” the boy asked.
“Yes,” the dad said. “He’s retired now and the people don’t want him to ever be forgotten, so the man who took his place had a statue made for him.”
That man who took over for Broyles as athletic director, Jeff Long, is why the Razorbacks are getting a new football center, one that will be state of the art. One in which even the training and dressing rooms can be shown to recruits now, something that had been skipped at times in the past.
The new facility marks the beginning of a new era with a new coach and an up-to-date attitude about brands, models and fund-raising.
It is the way of college football now. It is a business, one in which the fans are being taken for granted a little, much more so at places other than the UA. But there is now concern about that nationwide, and there will be more on that subject this week. But this was a quick tour during the lull before another football season crashes onto the campus and cities across this great state.
Sports, Pages 21 on 07/14/2013