DICK BROTHERS

This is just to point out a few very important things:

1. Richard Brothers
2. RICHARD BROTHERS
3. DICK BROTHERS
4. Arkansas has to be the only school to have a Richard Brothers AND actual Dick Brothers in Casey Dick and Nathan Dick
5. This is the part where you go oh wait they also had a coach named Houston Nutt tooThe
6. White cornerbacks with mustaches, baseball caps, and names that could have also doubled as gospel groups is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very [inhales] very, very, very, very, very, very 1980s Southwest Conference Thing.
7. Remember how Arkansas wasn’t in the SEC until 1992? The youth need to remember that, because prior to 1992 Arkansas spent a lot of its time fighting westward and to the south in the SWC, aka the Corruption Conference aka The One With SMU aka The Greatest Conference To Ever Basically Implode Under The Weight Of Its Own Awesomeness and Also The Corruption.
8. Was it unstable? Hell yes. Did it involve the University of Texas? Hell yes also. Does this whole political arrangement sound familiar, as if the Big 12 was kind of the same thing, just better concealed, and with a less openly lucrative market for players? Time is a flat circle and it’s filled with swaggering Longhorn boosters trying to throw their weight around, forever and ever.
9. Ironically, Arkansas’ new head coach Chad Morris comes from....SMU, the preppy bagmen who helped nuke the entire Southwest Conference, and who helped push Arkansas into the loving, profitable arms of the SEC.
10. Arkansas is still just the weirdest program ever, and not just because they have Dick Brothers and the Dick Brothers. They’ve got a weird coaching exchange program with Clemson. They did what everyone jokes about and fired their head coach Jack Crowe the morning after he lost to FCS Citadel. In 2007, they finished 8-5 with Darren McFadden, Felix Jones, and Peyton Hillis in the backfield. They have two home stadiums, hired Bret Bielema in part because he wrote a nice letter to their athletic director at the time, and took Bobby Petrino out of the Falcons job under cover of night. He had to call the Hogs at midnight. In a Southern Gothic novel that’s how you summon witches with lips full of Copenhagen and some serious grudges against dudes named “Randy”. In Arkansas football history, that’s normal, and hiring John L. Smith to steady a sinking ship after Petrino imploded is somehow considered a fix.
11. Matt Jones! Matt Jones got an NFL signing bonus running a Tecmo Bowl offense. There’s that, too, a marvel that will never lose its luster or glory. His greatest accomplishment in the NFL: Growing a mustache and looking like Young Leland Stottlemeyer on Monk.
12. We’re sorry one more thing: In 2006, Houston Nutt hired Gus Malzahn as offensive coordinator to get a bunch of recruits who played for Malzahn at Springdale High in Arkansas, put Malzahn in charge of the offense, and after one game agreed to start Malzahn’s high school QB, Mitch Mustain. The Razorbacks were 8-0 and rolling when Nutt got threatened by someone else other than Nutt looking brilliant. Nutt canned the whole experiment, benched Mustain and effectively ruined his college career, and somehow still got to the SEC Championship Game before losing to Florida. Nutt then lost Malzahn to Tulsa when Gus said screw it after the season, and one season later lost his job at Arkansas.
13. AND THIS WAS WHEN THINGS WERE GOING PRETTY WELL. We have to stop, because this well of dysfunction is too deep for a single post about guys with dick names.
14. The answer, we believe, to the initial question before all the giggling about Dicks and Richards and Nutts: Richard Brothers is chillin’ in Lowell, Arkansas, and works for the Clorox Company in Bentonville. Supply chains are like secondaries, y’all: Communication and keeping it clean is everything.

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