It is going to be interesting to see what becomes of the Southwest Classic, the annual college football clash between SEC foes Arkansas and Texas A&M inside the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium.
Today’s 11 a.m. contest on ESPN will be the eighth time in 10 years the two programs have met at Jerry’s World. The games in 2012 and 2013 were played on the two campuses.
Texas A&M, the designated home team this year and winner of six straight in the series, has hinted as far back as 2015 it would like to go back to playing at on-campus sites while Arkansas seems happy with the status quo in a series with a contract that runs through 2024.
The Aggie brass wants to understandably play in its renovated Kyle Field, which seats 102,733 fans after a $485 million makeover in 2015 instead of taking what the Dallas Morning News reports is around $3.5 million dollars home from playing in Arlington.
Arkansas also has a renovated stadium that seats 76,000, but still believes it benefits the school to play in Texas.
There is no buyout in the contract, but the contract does stipulate that if one program wants out of the deal, the SEC commissioner will mediate and the two schools will agree to whatever the commissioner decides.
When the Southwest Classic idea was first proposed by former Arkansas lineman and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones with a rental fee of just $100, it was thought it would provide a Texas recruiting windfall for Razorback football in luring several Lone Star state standouts to Fayetteville.
Arkansas won the first three Southwest Classic games, but it didn’t seem to move the needle much with Texas recruits, which the designated home team has always been able to bring in as unofficial guests.
While regular students have come from Texas in droves since 2009 — just check any University of Arkansas parking lot for proof of that — it really did not carry over into recruiting success for former Razorbacks coaches Bobby Petrino and Bret Bielema.
One can argue that Bielema and his staff didn’t put enough effort into Texas as those guys looked to land more players from their former Wisconsin pipeline in Florida than Texas — a risky strategy that seemed to work early, but faltered late.
Bielema landed only 14 Texas players total in his five recruiting classes, while Petrino’s four years at the helm saw him land a high of five in 2012 and only 19 overall.
A look at the current Razorback football roster shows only 10 scholarship players from Texas — five of whom were signed or transferred into Arkansas after new coach Chad Morris, a longtime Texas high school coach, was hired in December.
There are already six commits from Texas in the Razorbacks’ 2019 recruiting class and that number is likely to grow by several more before the class is put to bed in February.
Arkansas is also hitting Texas hard in the 2020 and 2021 classes with several scholarships already offered.
Morris made it clear from day one that he was going to recruit in-state first, but would hit his home state of Texas extremely hard, especially after his success as a high school coach in the state and three years as head coach at SMU.
Morris has not confirmed it, but he is likely much in favor of keeping the game in Arlington as he plots to restock the Razorbacks’ rebuilding cupboard with the help of the best Arkansas and Texas prospects that he can land.
It’s a strategy that worked for Frank Broyles, Ken Hatfield and Houston Nutt, who all had seasons that no doubt many Arkansas fans would suddenly love right now.