I have good news, Hog fans. The football Razorbacks are primed to go on a winning streak.
It’s on account of the long-espoused Brummett Theory on the Inverse Relationship Between the Quality of a State and the Quality of That State’s College Football Teams.
To put the theory simply: The worse your state, the better your college football.
Woooo pig.
Cases in point:
Alabama, a state that has twice failed in recent times on opportunities to repeal its inoperative state constitutional amendment requiring racially segregated schools, most recently in 2012, boasts of not one, but two, elite college football teams.
Mississippi, with the nation’s lowest rankings in educational performance, per capita earning and healthiness, and which is the only state in the country in which the percentage of the health-insured population has actually declined under Obamacare, crows of one college football team that is top-ranked in the nation and another not far from that.
Kansas, where public needs are going unmet because of irresponsible tax cutting, offers Kansas State, which was going great in college football until it ran into the Horned Frogs from …
Texas, where Rick Perry’s gubernatorial performance alone has sustained several highly successful college football teams.
Then there’s Louisiana. You have Huey Long, Edwin Edwards, Les Miles, the powerful Bayou Bengals and a Confederacy of Dunces, by which I might mean the novel and I might not.
Arkansas, by inverse evidence, is beset with a state college football team that hasn’t won a conference game in two years and has been distinguished otherwise by the kind of progressivism that produced Bill Clinton and the nationally acclaimed private-option form of Medicaid expansion. Oh, by the way—Arkansas voters extracted their segregation amendment from their constitution on their first try, in 1990, by the landslide of 51 percent to 49 percent.
Indeed, the national football dominance of the Southeastern Conference seems to be traceable directly to the substandard quality of life, relative to the rest of America, in the comparatively poor, comparatively under-educated and comparatively obese condition of citizens living in the states containing schools competing in football in the SEC.
The more you pay your college football coach, the less you pay your working people. The fitter your football stars, the less fit your fans.
Those are sub-theories of the general theory. Actually they also are … well, pretty much facts, or at least solid rules of thumb.
What happened in Arkansas on Election Day was that the state ended its peculiar status as a progressive island in the Football Ocean. It went wholesale for anti-government regression, which all its neighbors had begun embracing more than two decades before.
While all other states of our collegiate athletic alliance eschewed Medicaid expansion under Obamacare because it was … well, I don’t know … socialism, they thought … Arkansas put its better Democratic and Republican minds together and came up with the private-option form of Medicaid expansion to put Medicaid people into private health-care policies.
It has worked marvelously and become the talk and perhaps envy of the country.
But the voters of Arkansas elected last Tuesday two state senators and six state representatives who vowed to kill the private option.
Needing a three-fourths vote for its annual appropriation, the private option hasn’t that many votes to spare from the bare minimum it achieved after multiple runs earlier this year.
That means the private option is likely to die. And that means Arkansas will become poorer and fatter and less insured and altogether more like Mississippi. And that, in turn, means Brandon Allen’s passing arm will get stronger and the linebackers meaner and the receivers faster and the defensive backs bolder. Extra points may even get easier.
It may happen in these remaining three regular-season games. Or it might not take full effect until next season, when the political situation will provide a strong basis for hope that a national championship is not out of the question.
For that matter, things may get so bad in Arkansas that even the Red Wolves can get good.
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.