Despite missing part of last season due to injury, Frank Ragnow was named third team All-America by The Associated Press. This season, not one University of Arkansas football player was named to the first, second or third team, which was not a surprise.
There are several All-America teams, and to make any of them is a great honor because a player is chosen over all others who play his position.
In the past 30 years, the Razorbacks have had four players make The Associated Press All-America first team.
In 1989, Jim Mabry made it; 2003 was Shawn Andrews; in 2006 and 2007, Darren McFadden represented the Hogs; and in 2015, it was Hunter Henry. Three of those four were homegrown in Arkansas.
Since 1948, only 17 Hogs were named to the first team AP, and the only one besides McFadden to make the team in consecutive seasons was Billy Ray Smith Jr.
The lesson in this is simple: On Monday, AP named its All-America teams and Alabama had four first-team selections. Alabama is the best team in the country. To compete with the best, you have to have players who are at least considered for All-America honors.
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It felt like an ambush.
Kyler Murray had just won the Heisman Trophy, and a blogger from USA Today brings up some tweets Murray made when he was 14 and 15 years old using a word that has become highly offensive. The word used to mean strange or peculiar, but later it morphed into also meaning a derogatory term for homosexuals.
Murray almost immediately apologized and said he was wrong and those tweets don't reflect who he really is today.
He was 14 and 15 years old when he tweeted the word. It was seven years ago.
The story didn't go over well with the public, most of whom apparently have been a hormonal, not-so-mature teenager at some point in their life.
The blogger, a young guy who covers "social issues through a sports lens," said the tweet just came up. Nope. Someone had to dig through seven years of tweets to find those, so it wasn't just something that came up. How is that not an invasion of privacy?
President Trump loves to use the term "fake news," and finally we know what he is talking about.
Obviously, it was wrong for Murray to use the word, but more obviously he was just a kid. This isn't the first time this has happened, but surely at some point people will stop quoting 14-year-old kids.
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The first five of 40 bowl games kick off this Saturday. The last one, the College Football Playoff championship, is 23 days later on Jan 7.
That's a lot of bowl games that will have little interest to most of the country, but here's an objection to ESPN naming the Arizona Bowl with Arkansas State University and Nevada as the worst bowl for entertainment reasons.
Sure, there are some great games that day, Dec. 29, but it is unfair to declare that game the worst because it isn't a College Football Playoff game. It may be the least entertaining of that day, but it is light years ahead of the Tulane-Louisiana-Lafayette game this Saturday.
Eastern Michigan versus Georgia Southern in the Camellia Bowl on Saturday doesn't exactly pop anyone's corn either.
Basically, there are too many bowls, but that's not about to change as long as ESPN needs programming, and the media giant apparently does need the games since they are airing 31 of the 40 bowls.
The silver lining is there is football this Saturday.
Sports on 12/12/2018