FAYETTEVILLE — Call it Assumption Junction, the misdirected tracks where sure-thing expresses derail.
Assumption Junction derailed four-touchdown favorite Oklahoma last Saturday when it lost to Texas Tech in Norman, Okla.
The Arkansas Razorbacks almost derailed at Assumption Junction in Oxford, Miss. Arkansas, a 16-point favorite, trailed Ole Miss by 17 before overcoming the Rebels 29-24.
That Oxford experience ought to scare away any assumptions that Arkansas (6-1) will automatically sail into its Nov. 25 regular-season finale at No. 1 LSU with a 10-1 record.
Once Bobby Petrino’s Hogs picked up the pieces of their 38-14 loss at No. 2 Alabama by belting reigning national champion Auburn 34-14 in Fayetteville, assumptions mushroomed that they would win the rest before Baton Rouge.
After all, it was just Ole Miss, then “only” Vanderbilt on the road this Saturday in Nashville, Tenn., followed by successive Saturdays at home against unexpectedly beleaguered South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi State.
South Carolina and Tennessee have lost their starting quarterbacks for the season.
Mississippi State seems to be the SEC’s biggest flop to date thanks to great expectations gone unfulfilled.
Oh yeah, and there is Vanderbilt, the SEC’s lone private school and customary football doormat.
However, these Commodores under new Coach James Franklin have surprised many and are 4-3. That includes thrashing Ole Miss 30-7 back in September.
Last Saturday the Commodores beat Army 44-21, with Vanderbilt running back Zac Stacy gaining 198 yards on 21 carries.
Petrino says he won’t have to talk up Vandy to focus his Hogs — ranked 10th in the BCS standings — because they’ll see it for themselves.
“What gets their attention is when you put the video on and you see how well they [the Commodores] play the game,” Petrino said. “They play good defense. They’re physical. Then offensively, the way they can execute and move the ball … we have to go do things right to win the game.”
This isn’t the first time Arkansas has received serious Assumption Junction warnings regarding Vanderbilt.
Back in 2005, as former Arkansas Coach Houston Nutt’s Razorbacks prepared to play Vanderbilt and Southern California on successive Saturdays, former Arkansas defensive coordinator Reggie Herring drew media chuckles when he proclaimed that Vandy quarterback Jay Cutler was even more talented than Southern Cal’s Heisman Trophy winning quarterback, Matt Leinart.
Most media merely assumed Herring was trying to inflate Cutler so Arkansas’ defense wouldn’t look ahead to Leinart.
Comparing the subsequent NFL careers of Cutler and Leinart, it was the media who derailed that day at Assumption Junction.
THE RELUCTANT CHANCELLOR
Because he preferred teaching history and authoring books to politicking and money-chasing, Willard Gatewood didn’t choose to remain long as the University of Arkansas’ reluctant chancellor when the job was thrust upon him by his predecessor’s sudden resignation.
Nonetheless, during his 1984 and 1985 tenure heading the Fayetteville campus and long before and afterward as a distinguished professor, Willard Gatewood set a standard that a true scholarly champion of the liberal arts betters himself and his university by being the everyman, talking about the Hogs with anyone and everyone congregating at the local bank and on The Square.
The UA and Fayetteville are poorer following his death Sunday at 80, but they are so much richer that he was here.
Sports, Pages 16 on 10/26/2011