Rebel Yell For 1961

There was a time, not so many years ago, when the University of Arkansas would open its football season by joyously slaughtering East Central Oklahoma or Pittsburg State Teachers or the College of the Ozarks in the serene foothills that surround Fayetteville. It was not very joyous or serene for East Central Oklahoma and the other victims, of course, but that is the way most big colleges operated in those days. Warm-ups, they were called.

Today hardly anyone warms up any more, and in recent years Arkansas has been opening against Oklahoma State or Tulsa, and it has been winning Southwest Conference championships, which it seldom used to do. But last Saturday, to open the 1961 season, Arkansas stepped up yet another notch in class, and, as it turned out, Arkansas stepped into a bear trap. By the time the Razor-backs had escaped Jackson, Miss. they were ready to settle for the College of the Ozarks again. For Mississippi had joyously slaughtered Arkansas, losing its shirt (left and below) but winning its game, 16-0.

Played before a sellout crowd in the gleaming new 46,000-seat Mississippi Memorial Stadium, this was the first big game of the year and figured to be one of the most attractive. Mississippi was 1960 champion of the Southeastern Conference, Arkansas the champion of the Southwest. Mississippi, unbeaten, had been named the best college team in America by one postseason poll; Arkansas was ranked seventh by two others and both were reported to be loaded again. Mississippi had lost an All-America quarterback, Jake Gibbs, but with the kind of boys Johnny Vaught entices to Ole Miss, big and rough as riverboat deckhands, even an All-America is hardly missed. Arkansas, with the dazzling Lance Alworth at halfback and two superb quarterbacks in George McKinney and Billy Moore, expected to have its best offensive team in history.

Finally, this was to be the last game of a long and rarely peaceful rivalry that stretched back to 1908. Each team had won 12 games in the series, although Arkansas claimed that it had won 13, since an ineligible player named Little Joe Evans took part in Mississippi's 1914 win. In 1938 Wild Bill Schneller intercepted an Arkansas pass and returned it 45 yards for the winning touchdown. This would have been bad enough, since Arkansas was favored but, nearing the goal line, Schneller turned and thumbed his nose at the pursuing Porkers. This led to intersquad fisticuffs.

Last year Mississippi won 10-7 in the last three seconds on the most controversial single play of the 1960 season—a 39-yard field goal which every citizen of the state of Arkansas will swear on his deathbed curved foul by three feet. After the game, usually mild-mannered Coach Frank Broyles of Arkansas made several remarks about officiating, which led to a reprimand from the Southwest Conference. He also swore that he would never play Mississippi again after 1961, when the present four-year contract was scheduled to run out. Unfortunately for Broyles, it didn't run out soon enough.

There were three major factors contributing to Arkansas's defeat last Saturday. First, strangely enough, the weather in Fayetteville had been too cold for southern football. On the Thursday before the game Broyles looked out of his office at the lovely 60� day and shook his head. "I've never run into this before," he said. "It's actually such nice weather that we can't make the kids sweat. We've been practicing for a month and we haven't tired a boy out yet. And how hot do you suppose it's going to be over there in Jackson on Saturday, 105 degrees?" It was only 90.

The second item was the complete loss of Moore, who hurt a knee in scrimmage a week before the opener and was unable to play a down. McKinney is Arkansas's senior quarterback, a fine passer and a tremendous pressure player, but there are those in the Southwest Conference who consider Moore, a dashing, twisting runner, much the more dangerous of the two. As a pair, they make a beautiful team. Alone, McKinney had more than he could handle, particularly when forced to play almost every minute of a long, hot afternoon.

Finally, and not exactly incidentally, Ole Miss had a better team. "I don't like to say this," said Broyles before the game, "but that field goal last year really had very little to do with our discontinuing the series after this year. Mississippi is just too big and too deep and too rough. They wear you out and leave you in bad shape for your conference games. Even if we beat them, it doesn't mean anything in the Southwest Conference. All that counts down here is beating Texas and Baylor and Rice."

Johnny Vaught has indeed built a magnificent football dynasty at Ole Miss (SI, Sept. 19, 1960). His record, going into his 15th year at Oxford, was 110 victories, 29 defeats and seven ties, second only to Bud Wilkinson among the nation's major college coaches. He has lost only three games while winning 29 in the last three years. His boys are recruited almost entirely from the state of Mississippi and, just as Broyles says, they are big and fast and rough. With such material, hardly anyone would blame Vaught for overpowering the teams on his schedule, smashing their tackles and guards into insensibility in order to gain three and four yards a play. But Vaught, a gambler, doesn't play the game that way. "He goes for the big play, he tries to kill you quick," says Broyles. "His defense is the same way. Most college teams play a containing defense: Mississippi attacks 90% of the time. They're always waiting across that line on one foot ready to come after you. They force you. They may guess wrong and give you 15 yards on a play that is supposed to gain only four, but the next time they knock you back 10 yards when you try the same thing. Mississippi doesn't play tag out there. They come after you."

From shadow to substance