At halftime of the Arkansas basketball game against Maryland-Eastern Shore on Monday night, I texted my brother, who lives in Salisbury, Maryland, which is about the distance from the UMES campus as Rogers High School is from the UA in Fayetteville. When I told him the score at the break, his response captured more than he probably meant it to, thanks to his overly journalistic and semantic-minded sibling.
“Poor kids.”
Indeed. Maryland-Eastern Shore, one of eight historically black colleges or universities in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, had just 10 players dress against an SEC basketball powerhouse. Arkansas spent about $12 million, give or take, on basketball in the couple years before John Calipari arrived. UMES’ entire athletic budget is around $8 million. That’s every sport. You can guess how the game went based on those facts alone. Or, if you were one of the 12,000 or so inside Bud Walton Arena, you watched – with glazed eyes, probably – the Razorbacks’ 109-35 win tie for the third-largest margin of victory in school history.
UMES received a hefty sum of money from Arkansas for taking part in the game. It’s unclear how much because the Razorbacks’ athletic department redacts financial figures when they release game-contract details. Wouldn’t want that negotiation advantage disappearing. But it’s a safe bet the school in Princess Anne, Maryland, actually made a profit by flying to the Natural State for a loss.
No Need For That
The game was one that, really, shouldn’t take place in this day and age anymore, said Best of Arkansas Sports’ Andrew Hutchinson. And he has a point.
Sort of.
No one who watched the game Monday night walked away happy with what they saw. In the most generous of readings, a big school helped a small one in a quid pro quo situation. Arkansas is not unfamiliar with playing schools from Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and the Southwestern Athletic Conference, two leagues populated by HBCUs. In fact, recently, the Razorbacks have begun to play Arkansas-Pine Bluff – the Natural State’s largest HBCU – in football.
The two schools have played semi-regularly in other sports, namely baseball, in the previous decade, too. This after years of an unspoken rule in the Arkansas athletic department that the Hogs not face any team from inside the state. Considering the Razorbacks have beaten UAPB 45-3 and, this year, 70-0, there is no fear of other schools usurping talent or eyeballs anymore. The games have been glorified practices and, Hutchinson argued, scheduling of even slightly superior opponents would be a better use of the Hogs’ time.
What good is it to Arkansas in playing games like those against Maryland-Eastern Shore? At least when the Hogs play UAPB, it’s cheaper for the Golden Lions to make the trek to Fayetteville or Little Rock. But any suggestion Arkansas is doing it to ‘help’ UAPB is faulty. If Arkansas really wanted to help, they’d play the game in Pine Bluff.
The Razorbacks are better off playing other small-conference schools that could realistically compete and aren’t as often disenfranchised (although, apparently, chances are getting harder and harder to come by, period, unless you have extraordinary talent or money). Last year, Arkansas opened against Alcorn State out of the SWAC and came away with a 93-59 win that hurt the team’s NET ranking and provided a sense of false hope, too, considering the victory masked what would end up being the worst Hogs basketball season since 2010.
It’s More Complicated Than Simple Margins of Victory and Defeat
In a viewpoint that has fallen out of favor in the last couple years, but one still accepted by intellectuals and historians, a marginalized school populated mostly by black Americans, a group whose rights and equalities have long been short of Anglo contemporaries, was embarrassed by a richer, more powerful flagship institution in a Jim Crow state rife with both government-suggested segregation and self segregation in order to maintain its semblances of equality in a hierarchal system perpetuated to maintain cultural, economic, physical and psychological discrepancies.
Whew. OK, I grant such a viewpoint is specific almost to the point of caricature. As the kids say, “it ain’t that deep.”
But it’s also not that simple, either. The harsh reality is that many HBCUs at the Division I level rely on such games to help fund athletics. Only five of the 21 such schools finished in the black during the academic year 2021-22, the last year data was available. Consider, for example, UAPB. The school lost $40,000 playing sports. Not a large sum in a vacuum, but the entire revenue stream for Golden Lions athletics was $8.65 million, ranking the school 226th out of the 231 public schools in Division I. Consider, too, that in the 2009-10 season, UAPB played its first 12 basketball games on the road, largely because it was more profitable to do so, what with the payouts received from opponents.
Arkansas Is Closer To Texas Than UAPB
Academics, sociologists and businesspersons have weighed the cost-benefit of such programs for decades, especially as the discrepancy between the haves and have-nots in American collegiate athletics – much like discrepancy in American public itself – has grown since the turn of the century. For example, Texas’ athletic revenue was $271 million in 2023. Heck, U of A Fayetteville’s athletic revenue was $167 million. The Hogs aren’t the Horns, certainly, but they’re a heck of a lot closer to Texas than Maryland-Eastern Shore or UAPB.
The flip side is the argument that a school like UMES is a Division I school and its administration knows exactly what it is in for at the Division I level. A point can be made here, though the only part of which I agree is that Arkansas should play such schools. The why is the difference, methinks. As a personal fan of giving opportunities to those who may otherwise go without, I want to maximize the HBCU experience, including in athletics. “Maximize” means just that: give them as much money and power as necessary for them to flourish.
As to whether Arkansas should schedule more such games, I agree with Hutchinson. The Hogs shouldn’t, unless the Razorbacks want to provide the smaller school a financial payout and are willing to travel themselves. Even then, if I’m an athletic director, I don’t schedule such a game without player and coach feedback. I’d be rare in that, too, considering sports aren’t an ethical battlefield but a business one. And Arkansas sports are in the business of making money.
Money Makes The World Go ‘Round
“Money wins championships” used to be a phrase reserved for the professional ranks. The NIL game and the transfer portal have changed that in what has been a massive win for labor in the 21st century. In the system that exists, in the states in which it exists, however, HBCUs and other small institutions are left out in the cold, their opportunities rarer than ever to upset the apple cart. They could barely compete against the big dogs before. When money dictates opportunity, the odds fall further.
When Brown vs. Board of Education and the associated Supreme Court rulings de-segregated schools, the role of the HBCU changed. Black athletes had more opportunity to go to integrated schools for both athletics and academics and many took advantage. Sports were hurt further at HBCU schools in the era of cable and the absurd TV rights deals major conferences cut with networks. Now, with NIL, historically black colleges and universities can’t keep up. Deion Sanders had Jackson State on the cusp, but, like so many before him, he fled to places with greater opportunity.
Poor kids. As in, low-income young men.
Poor kids. As in, I sympathize with that result.
Poor kids. As in, this is the system in which you must exist and, unfortunately, things don’t look like they’re changing soon.
***
A historical pre-cursor.
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