It's an antiquated practice, like a white person in Arkansas voting Democratic.
You have a mid-American institution of higher education located in Fayetteville. It calls itself the University of Arkansas and is endowed into semi-private status by the super-rich Walton family. It offers discounted tuition through a bordering multistate region from Texas northeastward to Illinois.
The antiquated practice is this university's transporting its substandard football team downstate to Little Rock for one token game a year, probably to be lost in humiliating fashion to Monroe or Toledo or sometimes to an entire state, like Georgia.
The game gets played in an undersized 1950s-era stadium that doesn't even fill to its pitiable capacity barely in excess of 50,000.
Arkansas State can draw 30,000 in Jonesboro as it plays the Missouri Tigers about as well as these previously referenced Razorbacks played them.
This second-home football tradition limps to a surely imminent mercy killing, having lived this long only because Arkansas is a stubbornly static place, uncommonly small and insular. Cultural and economic evolution that is prevalent elsewhere emerges only grudgingly here, about two decades behind national or regional trends.
The only remaining other examples of major college football teams giving up an on-campus game for a second home have to do with mutually agreed neutral sites among major rivals--such as Oklahoma and Texas playing in Dallas and Florida and Georgia playing in Jacksonville.
So here's the heck of that: Arkansas does that, too, agreeing to play conference foe Texas A&M every year in Jerry Jones' stadium in Dallas, which, by the way, is where the university reaps much of its current enrollment growth. It lures students charged low costs previously reserved only for Arkansas students.
It makes eminently more sense for this mid-American institution of higher education to embrace for a second home the metropolis of Dallas rather than Little Rock.
There are more people in Dallas. They have more money. There are more potential students.
There are more potential football recruits, which, Lord knows, this team needs.
I'd say that Dallas offers a swankier stadium, except the fact is so painfully obvious that it seems absurdly redundant to utter.
They have a television screen in the Dallas stadium that is bigger than the entirety of the Little Rock stadium, which, by the way, achieves its declared seating capacity of slightly more than 50,000 by measuring each seat for one typical Arkansas buttock.
This Little Rock tradition dates to the glory days when I was a child. The economic, political and cultural balance of our small poor state was tilted heavily toward Little Rock and the farm and timber reaches to its east and south. A single-tier stadium of 50,000--or fewer then--was a worthy home for the university team from the distant northwest corner.
The Hogs played as many home games there as in Fayetteville, and sometimes more. The atmosphere was eerily electric.
The UA existed more then as a simple Arkansas land-grant school than a regional one looking for students as much to Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas and Missouri and even Illinois as to downstate Arkansas, which, tragically, is in decline by population and economy.
Now Greater Little Rock merely holds its own in the economic and population balance of the state, thanks only to serving as the state capital and to white-flight suburban and exurban havens. The current balance otherwise tilts heavily to the northwest corner, now about as populated as Greater Little Rock and actually richer, possessed of one of the world's leading companies and greatest art museums. It's closer to Springfield, Mo.; Tulsa, Okla.; and Pittsburg, Kan.; than Little Rock.
The current contract provides that these Kentucky-caliber Razorbacks will continue to play a game a year in Little Rock through 2018. I guess I'm joking when I say War Memorial may want out of the contract in light of current Razorback performance.
But it is surely heretical of me, a proud lifelong Little Rockian, to say in all seriousness that the plain truth is that there is no logical reason for this anachronistic association to continue.
Little Rock merchants need the business, but the team needs to attend to its campus and own economy.
Maybe Arkansas State and UCA, with wannabe programs for growing populations in Jonesboro and Conway, could play each other in Little Rock each year. It wouldn't be the same, but it would put us on the arc of inevitable change, on the cusp of evolution, not buried as usual in the sand.
There is some talk that UALR could start a football program. But it can't seem to find even five good basketball players.
Things simply change, albeit more slowly here.
Those 50,000 people in War Memorial Stadium ... they thought they were Democrats until about 2010.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/22/2015