Moore: This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Matthew Moore. Joining us for his usual segment about Ozarks history is our pal Jared Phillips. Jared, welcome back.
Phillips: Hey, how are you?
Moore: I'm good. We are in the early era of Razorbacks football. Little hit, little miss sometimes here.
Phillips: That's right.
Moore: We are excited to talk about the history of sports throughout the Ozarks. And you're coming in with a little bit of a disclaimer here that you are not a huge sports fan.
Phillips: I'm not a huge sports guy. My father-in-law and brother-in-law chuckled kind of meanly when they found out that I was going to talk about sports over with you guys.
No, like everybody, I grew up around here, and I kind of paid attention to the Razorbacks. I remember the basketball run to the national championship and these things, but never was a big sports guy and didn't play sports in school. And now my two sons play sports and they're fanatics about football. I've learned more about football in the last 18 months than I've known my whole life.
But I got to thinking about, it's been a tough couple of years for the Razorback football program. And so I got to thinking, the historian in me wanted to put some of this into a little bit of context. And that's what I do. And so I said, well, maybe I'll just think about some of the early days of the Razorback football program. And just like, yeah, we're a tough program. We can make it through this. It's going to be just fine.
Moore: OK, so where do you want to start this conversation?
Phillips: Let's start at the beginning. That's where historians love to start, right? So the University of Arkansas gets started in the 1870s. We don't have a football program right off the bat, but we get one in 1894, is the first year of our football program. We are not the Razorbacks at this point. We are still the Arkansas Cardinals. This is a story that most people in the area know. Even I know this as a non-sports person.
But our first coach is John Futrall. We have a hall named after him on campus. And he actually, in the tradition of sports programs across certainly Arkansas and I presume most of the rest of the country, he was a teacher and a coach. He was a Latin professor. And then he started the first football team for what becomes the Razorbacks.
And our first three coaches are actually teachers. We had a Latin professor, then we had an engineering professor and then we had a Romance languages professor.
Moore: Fascinating.
Phillips: Yeah. My brother-in-law wanted me to make sure that I pointed out that they had a very successful, they had a 14-win combination across sporadic early seasons. Yeah, yeah. And his suggestion was maybe we should think about having teachers go back into sports. But I pushed back on that. I think coaches should be coaches and teachers should be teachers. And so I would make a terrible coach. So yeah.
Moore: OK. So we start off with this sort of, as many programs do, I imagine even college programs in the early days, of kind of this dual role here. I think many of us are familiar with, we were once the Cardinals, we became the Razorbacks.
Phillips: Yeah.
Moore: Can we talk some more about that?
Phillips: Yeah. So that's actually a really interesting story, I thought. This is going to be our eighth coach, a guy named Hugo Bezdek. And he's not an Arkansan. He and his family move here. And the end of the 19th century, he's from Prague. They'll move to outside of Chicago. He'll ultimately go play football for the University of Chicago.
And today, when we think the University of Chicago, we don't think of them as a football powerhouse. My cousin once told me they measure success in Nobel Prizes, not in football trophies. But at the time, they were a big, big football team.
So he'll go on from playing football there to coach at Oregon. He'll coach at Oregon for a few years, then he'll come to Arkansas. And it's when he's here at Arkansas, during one of his seasons here, that we're going to play a football game and he's going to like, "Golly, these guys played like a wild band of Razorbacks." This is the anecdotal story of how we get our name, right?
And he actually has a really interesting career here. And he's going to have several really top-notch winning games, but then we're going to blow out LSU in 1909. That's what prompts him to give us the name Razorback.
After that, in 1912, 1913, he's going to go back to Oregon, Hugo Bezdek does, and then he's going to go on and work at Penn State as a coach. He's going to also manage the Pittsburgh Pirates for a time. And for two years, he'll have a losing record, 166-187 games. So not the best record, but I couldn't manage one team, much less two different sports at one time.
Moore: That's really fascinating.
Phillips: Right? But while at Penn as a football coach, he has a couple of undefeated seasons and he's actually going to be the only football coach that takes three different teams to the Rose Bowl.
Moore: Wow.
Phillips: And the two of them win and one of them loses. The Penn State one he loses. Oregon goes. And he coached a small little college team called Mare Island for just a little bit in there.
Moore: As someone who's a transplant to the region, I have never known a quote-unquote good Razorbacks football team. And so it's interesting to hear this sort of nostalgia, this sort of idea of like, "Trust me, we were good once. We were actually really good once."
I think that's a bit of a characteristic of the Ozarks too, is this romanticism of the past and remembering that who you once were can help to define who you can be still.
Phillips: Yeah. And I think Razorback football is a good lesson, that lesson, because there are legitimate periods where we are very good. I mean, the Lou Holtz and Frank Broyles years are, I mean, those are nothing to be sniffed at, right?
And even more recent coaches, I know he's controversial, but Bobby Petrino had a pretty good run. Houston Nutt had a pretty good run. There's several coaches that have had really good, they had that magic moment, right? Like all teams, all teams have these kind of magic combinations. And they have periods where they're not as dominant.
Who knows what's going to happen in the era of NIL and kind of the lawsuits that are coming out of with LSU, which is a rivalry that we've had since we switched into the SEC. We've always had it out for Louisiana anyways as Arkansans, but that really jumps up when we play them on the gridiron. And so we just don't know.
Moore: So for people who are looking at a season like this, they are optimistic, but they're realistic about our future here this season. As a historian, as someone who can have a bit of a zoomed-out lens on the program as a whole, what advice, what sort of consolation do you give fans who are looking at a season like this and thinking there's a chance we might have just watched our last win?
Phillips: Stay the course, stay the course. Every time we brought in a new coach, it was always a gamble, right? And sometimes they didn't pay off, but most of the time they pay off. And we see the development of a good program. Stay the course, I think, is what I would say when I look at the different coaches that we've had over the years, the different players that we've had come through.
I think the success of the Razorback program should be measured less than its win. So it's important more these, and every team that I went through, every roster I looked at, there were always names that stood out. Like I knew who some of these people were not because they were football players, but because they had gone on and done great things for the state of Arkansas.
And that's the magic of the football program, right? In so many cases, the Razorback program, like other programs, give so many people opportunities that could not be had otherwise. So Razorback fans should stay the course. Don't give up hope on the Hogs. It's worth the investment.
Moore: I love it. Jared, thank you as always.
Phillips: Anytime.
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