FAYETTEVILLE — Games against Texas and, to a lesser extent, LSU are remembered best, but one of Arkansas' greatest series through the years has been with Ole Miss.
The Razorbacks and Rebels began playing in 1908, four days before the Chicago Cubs won their last World Series.
In the 108 years since, the series has been played in six cities in four states, and the Razorbacks have won a little more than half the games. Arkansas leads the all-time series 34-27-1, unless you ask Ole Miss.
The Razorbacks claim the Rebels used an ineligible player named Joe Evans in a 1914 game and Arkansas won by virtue of a forfeit. Ole Miss disputes that claim.
According to various accounts, a 1938 game in Memphis ended in a brawl between the teams and their fans. According to an account in the Hope Star, Ole Miss' Bill Schneller returned an interception 54 yards for a touchdown and ran the final 30 yards backward while thumbing his nose at Arkansas players. He then thumbed his nose at the Arkansas fans when he crossed the goal line.
"When the gun sounded, the fans poured out on the field to fight," said Tad Smith, former Ole Miss assistant coach and athletics director in the 1980 book Ole Miss Football. "It was wild. People were fighting everywhere."
The series' golden years came in the 1950s and '60s when Ole Miss and Arkansas were among the best programs in college football. The Rebels claim three national championships and won six Southeastern Conference championships during the Johnny Vaught era that began in 1947.
Arkansas had similar success under Frank Broyles beginning a decade later. Broyles won eight Southwest Conference championships and the Razorbacks claim a national championship for 1964.
Preston Carpenter's touchdown vs. Ole Miss in 1954 gave Arkansas a 6-0 win
In 1954, Arkansas beat Ole Miss 6-0 at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock in a game between the eventual champions of the Southwest Conference and Southeastern Conference. Halfback Buddy Bob Benson's 66-yard touchdown pass to Preston Carpenter became known as the "Powder River Play" and is credited as the moment the Razorbacks became a statewide obsession.
"Johnny Vaught was a really rugged individual and his players possessed the same attitude," said Eddie Bradford, an Arkansas offensive lineman from 1952-54. "They were really quite tough. It seemed to me like it was different from playing in the Southwest Conference.
"It was definitely an out-of-conference rivalry and it was very difficult every time we played."
Like any good rivalry, there have been memorable moments away from the field. In 1958, Lance Alworth - a native of Brookhaven, Miss. - committed to play for Broyles. The reason: Arkansas allowed married couples to live together in university housing, while Ole Miss did not. Alworth, a future Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee, was married.
In 1960, Broyles was reprimanded by the SWC for criticizing officials following a controversial loss to Ole Miss that was decided by a last-second field goal. According to Sports Illustrated, he vowed he would never play the program again after their final contracted game in 1961.
"They wear you out and leave you in bad shape for your conference games," Broyles told Sports Illustrated in 1961. "Even if we beat them, it doesn't mean anything in the Southwest Conference. All that counts down here is beating Texas and Baylor and Rice."
As fate would have it, the teams would meet again two more times in Broyles' tenure as head coach, and many more times after he became athletics director.
In 1963, Ole Miss beat Arkansas 17-13 in the Sugar Bowl to cap its third national championship season.
Archie Manning was the MVP of the Rebels' 1970 Sugar Bowl upset
Arkansas' 1969 season is remembered best for a loss to Texas in The Big Shootout. Ole Miss' 1969 season is remembered best for beating the Razorbacks 27-22 the following month in the Sugar Bowl.
Archie Manning had a touchdown run and a touchdown pass, and was the game's MVP. It was the last time the teams played when both were ranked in the top 25 - Arkansas was No. 3 and Ole Miss was No. 13.
It was also the final coaching matchup between Vaught and Broyles. Vaught won all six meetings.
Eleven years before the Razorbacks moved to the SEC, the teams began playing an annual series again. Arkansas and Ole Miss have played every year since 1981 - the Razorbacks' longest running series against one team.
Arkansas has had the upper hand since the series resumed with a 21-13-1 record over the past 35 seasons.
After years of ho-hum contests, the series received a jolt in the late 1990s. In December 1997, Arkansas native Tommy Tuberville was a finalist for the Razorbacks' head coaching job. He was coaching Ole Miss at the time.
"Nothing stinks like a wet hog," Tuberville told his team prior to the game the next season, a rain-soaked 34-0 win by the Razorbacks.
Perhaps the best game between the teams came in 2001 when neither team was ranked. Their game was tied 17-17 at the end of regulation, but quarterbacks Matt Jones and Eli Manning dueled for seven overtimes as the teams broke the NCAA record for longest overtime game. Nearly five hours after the game began, Arkansas won 58-56 with a defensive stop on a two-point conversion.
The 2001 win began a streak of six wins in seven games for the Razorbacks over the Rebels. The series didn't turn back in Ole Miss' favor until 2008 after a coaching change and it has been entertaining ever since.
Less than a week after leading Arkansas to a win at No. 1 LSU, Houston Nutt resigned as the Razorbacks' coach and took the same job at Ole Miss. Ironically, Nutt was the man Arkansas had hired over Tuberville 10 years earlier.
Houston Nutt's return to Fayetteville as Ole Miss coach was a bizarre scene
In 2008, Nutt returned to Arkansas and won 23-21. Ole Miss won again the next year at home.
The Razorbacks finally got the best of their old coach in 2010 and helped oust him at Ole Miss the following year when the Rebels blew a 17-point lead at home. Ole Miss finished winless in the SEC that year and Nutt was fired.
In 2012, the Rebels' Bryson Rose kicked a field goal as time expired to beat the Razorbacks in Little Rock - a near repeat of the finish 52 years earlier at the same stadium.
Arkansas has stunned Ole Miss the past two years. The No. 8 Rebels lost 30-0 in Fayetteville two years ago, then lost 53-52 in an overtime thriller last season at home.
The Razorbacks' fourth-and-25 conversion in overtime was the craziest play in the recorded history of the series and kept the Rebels from playing in their first SEC Championship Game.
Hunter Henry's fourth-and-25 lateral saved the Razorbacks in overtime in 2015
"I don't voluntarily watch that play, I can assure you," Ole Miss coach Hugh Freeze said. "If I were to see it, it would probably make my stomach churn."
Arkansas and Ole Miss haven't claimed each other as rivals since their heydays in the '60s, but maybe they should. If a rivalry is defined by equal parts ecstasy and agony, then these two would be hard-pressed to find many better through the years.
From off-field disputes to on-field fights, poaching coaches to wild finishes, this series has just about seen it all.