How did Tennessee Not Become a Rival?

Hogs never developed a taste for Volunteer blood

Quick, name your favorite moment from this big rivalry between Arkansas and Tennessee.

The majority of you were probably short-circuited by the idea of there ever being a rivalry between Arkansas and Tennessee. 

A few of our readers 60+ in age probably said in your heads that I must be confused and meant the other UT that wears orange, but no, that UT goes by UT-Austin and hasn't been a rival since most of our readers were in elementary school or not yet born.

Those who weren't short-circuited are probably questioning whether they suffered a head injury at some point because they can't think of a big moment. Most probably couldn't drum up anything outside of Tennessee shutting down a game by raining down trash and mustard for a good 20 minutes, but that was against Ole Miss and Lane Kiffin.

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Trash litters the sidelines after it was ruled that Jacob Warren was a yard short of the first down marker on a 4th and 24 play during an SEC football game between Tennessee and Ole Miss at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tenn. on Saturday, Oct. 16, 2021. Tennessee fans littered the Neyland Stadium field with debris for several minutes following Ole Miss' game-clinching defensive stop with 54 seconds to play.

A solid handful drug that nightmare of game last century against Tennessee where Arkansas quarterback Clint Stoerner tripped over Brandon Burlsworth, fumbling away a chance to run out the clock for the win in Neyland Stadium in what was more or less a de facto national championship game in Houston Nutt's first year. 

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Arkansas' Clint Stoerner fumbles the ball in the closing minutes of play against Tennessee on Nov. 14, 1998, turning the ball over in Knoxville. The Vols' Billy Ratliff (40) recovered and Tennessee won the game 28-24. The play preserved Tennessee's undefeated season and they went on to win the national championship.

Even more ardent fans may remember a bad Arkansas team kicking a field goal to upset No. 4 Tennessee on the road with an interim head coach in 1992. 

But what about those big basketball moments? I'll wait.

No. That's Memphis. You'll have a lot of those, and while that's technically in Tennessee, it doesn't count.

Nope. That was Vanderbilt. While they're in Tennessee also and have a great basketball history, this is not the team you are looking for.

All you can probably tell us about Tennessee basketball is that at some point in 1996 John Fulkerson showed up to start playing for them and never left the team, there was another player whose name you can't remember who played for about 10 years also, and you think Bruce Pearl coached there, but you can't seem to pull up a memory of him coaching that isn't at Auburn.

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Tennessee forward John Fulkerson (10) grabs the ball as Arkansas guard JD Notae (1) reaches for the ball during a game at Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville, Tenn. on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021.

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University of Tennessee head men s basketball coach Bruce Pearl expresses remorse for giving misleading information to the NCAA during an investigation in June of this year. The press conference on Friday, Sep. 10, 2010 revealed that Pearl's compensation will be reduced by $1.5 million over the next five years. 

But why is this?

That upset win over Tennessee in football when Arkansas came into the league in 1992 sent the Volunteers into a tailspin, losing three games in a row by a total of nine points while costing head coach Johnny Majors one of his best shots at a national title. 

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When basketball season rolled around, Tennessee upset a Razorback team featuring five future NBA players in its starting line-up. The following season, a freshman version of the team that won the national title the following season and made the national championship game the year after that, came into the SEC throwing its weight around. Yet, Tennessee pulled the upset again, winning their two first-ever meeting as conference foes.

On paper the table was set for these two teams to quickly develop a mutual disdain for one another. Those kind of upsets to start conference play in each of the two major sports should have set the table, but that wasn't the case.

Arkansas entered the league looking for a rival. Kentucky was an automatic in basketball as the Hogs and Wildcats were two of the most dominant programs in the country at the time and had been for a while. 

Ole Miss seemed a good possibility as a rival across the board. The two teams had played numerous times in non-conference games, and the two states had developed a habit of saying "Yeah, well, at least we're not _________" about each other as the rest of the country took joy in digging up statistics and sticking Arkansas and Mississippi interchangeably at the bottom of each one.

LSU made sense as there was a light mix of Tigers fans in Southern Arkansas and a light mix of Arkansas fans in Northern Louisiana. Those latter fans probably just made a trip down to the Pecanland Mall, got lost of the way back and decided to stay wherever the car died.

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A fan holds up a sign during the second half of the game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and the LSU Tigers at Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium. The Arkansas Razorbacks defeat the LSU Tigers 17-0.

There was also the joy Arkansas took in having Oliver Miller take an unstoppable Shaquille O'Neal out of the game on the court while Nolan Richardson and Dale Brown battled it out for biggest SEC coaching personality from the sidelines. 

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LSU Tigers center Shaquille O'Neal in action against the Tennessee Volunteers during the 1992 SEC Championship at the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center.

There were also a few key recruiting battles along the I-20 corridor. Richardson's staff identified Scotty Thurman as a 15-year old at an AAU tournament held in Jonesboro and stuck with him long enough to lure the Ruston Rifle right out from under Brown's nose.

The key to Arkansas and Tennessee not becoming rivals stems back to at least a couple of things. 

The first is the conference's reliance on divisions early on. While football and baseball still maintain East and West divisions, this once applied to basketball as well. This meant Arkansas and Tennessee met up a single time most years in basketball. 

When divisions first started in football, each team got a permanent rival from the opposite division. While Tennessee made for a logical choice with the two states bordering one another, the Volunteers had a legitimate rivalry with Alabama that had to be maintained and no one wanted to dance with fellow newcomer South Carolina. 

So, the SEC threw down the proverbial pool stick and told the two newbies to battle it out to prove who actually belonged in the conference.

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South Carolina Gamecocks quarterback Jake Bentley (19) fumbles while being hit by South Carolina Gamecocks linebacker Skai Moore (10) in the first half at Williams-Brice Stadium. Bentley recovered the fumble. 

With most Hog fans, outside of baseball fanatics (this was a much different time for college baseball when it was the invisible sport until the College World Series), getting to see Tennessee only once per year, and that was only if the fish weren't biting, the Volunteers became an afterthought.

But this goes a little deeper than the two schools just not seeing each other.

 Tennessee and Arkansas met in the Cotton Bowl in 1990, each team a single slip-up away from most likely playing for a national championship. Instead, they were meeting as a pair of 10-1 Top 10 teams in one of the Big 4 bowls at a time where big games like that weren't guaranteed.

It should have been a huge deal. But, somehow it wasn't. 

It's the only Arkansas bowl game I didn't stay home and watch. Instead, I went with my mother to the Pines Mall in Pine Bluff. I remember watching the final few minutes of the game through a shoe store window display where a small TV had been set up. 

I was literally the only person watching what would end up being a 31-27 Tennessee victory with the game hanging in the balance.

However, it was the words of an ESPN analyst the night before that captured why this isn't a rivalry. I forget the entire sentence the man spoke, but I do recall how mad and disrespected it made my dad feel.

When it came time to preview the Arkansas-Tennessee game, the analyst said "Nobody outside of a bunch of stump jumpers and (some other derogatory backwoods insult I can't recall) in Tennessee and Arkansas cares about this game."

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Tennessee fans follow the chant of cheerleader Reggie Coleman during a pep rally at Union Stadium in Dallas Dec. 31, 1989, a warm-up for their Cotton Bowl game against Arkansas.

Two of the most passionate, dedicated fan bases in all of sports had been reduced to nothing more than a stereotype straight out of "Deliverance." 

While Arkansas didn't do itself favors with the number of men at games going shirtless under a pair of Big Smith overalls, and Tennessee hurt its national perception with coonskin hats all over the stadium, the two sides were united in a hatred toward a haughty media group out of Connecticut disrespecting them with cheap shots rather than building a distaste for one another.

They were brothers in arms against The Man. Two groups bound by mutual disrespect and the ability to easily see the world around them from each other's shoes. 

There was so much in common that it was hard to discern the fan bases outside the colors they wore and which sports they actually won national championships in.

It's like playing ball at the YMCA against a team that has a couple of your cousins on it. You want to win, but there's not that deep-seeded anger where if you accidentally hurt one of them you just step over their writhing body. 

Nope. You run over to the truck with the tailgate down on the side of the field where they're selling Coke in wax cups after the game to get a soda together and play a game of cup ball when you're done with your drink. 

So, despite all the efforts to drum up passion for Saturday's game with a red-out, pop-poms, and a who's who of Razorback basketball guests, Eric Musselman will have to be understanding of the fact that, while fans will be passionate about his Razorbacks, they will be about as pumped for Tennessee as they were for Hofstra. 

In fact, after the Pride pulled the upset earlier this year, if you rolled Hofstra out on Saturday instead of Tennessee, fans would be way more ravenous and out for blood than they will be for the Volunteers.

It's just hard to hate someone with whom you have so much in common.