College football looked quite a bit different the last time Arkansas and Oklahoma State met on the gridiron.
Back in 1980, NIL didn’t exist, but the Pac-12 did — albeit as the Pac-10. The Big 12 was the Big Eight, and there were actually eight teams in the conference. The now-defunct Southwest Conference comprised of teams currently in the SEC, Big 12, ACC and AAC.
The Razorbacks and Cowboys were each led by future College Football Hall of Famers in Lou Holtz and Jimmy Johnson, respectively. Johnson, a former Arkansas lineman who’d started on the ‘64 national title team, led a squad featuring a quarterback named Houston Nutt.
A former player and coach at both schools, Nutt has perhaps the most unique perspective of the Arkansas vs Oklahoma State rivalry, which will resume after a 44-year break at 11 a.m. CT Saturday inside T. Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater, Okla.
Houston Nutt’s Connection
Growing up in Little Rock, he — and his three brothers — attended many games in what used to be essentially an annual early-season non-conference matchup at War Memorial Stadium. The two teams met 28 times in a span of 31 years from 1950-80, with all but three of those games played in Arkansas’ capital city.
Nutt was born in 1957, in the midst of 20 straight Arkansas-Oklahoma State games in Little Rock.
“I remember that big ol’ Pistol Pete head, the big mascot, and I always noticed him,” Nutt told Best of Arkansas Sports. “I always thought we had the best mascot, the Razorbacks. So as a little boy at 4 years of age, that’s the first thing that comes to my mind, when my dad took four little boys to our first Razorback game.”
Those games also laid the foundation of Nutt’s philosophy when it came to in-state recruiting. As the Razorbacks’ head coach, he always took pride in keeping the best players from Arkansas home during his UA coaching tenure 1998-2007 and did so at a pretty high clip.
“As I got older, I remember Phillip Dokes (North Little Rock), an Arkansas product, and Duck White (Hot Springs) who played for Oklahoma State,” Nutt said. “I always thought, ‘Man, they need to be playing for Arkansas.’ I had that sense of ‘Arkansas needs to stay in Arkansas’ kind of attitude, and I was kind of bummed out, especially when they beat us.”
Arkansas mostly owned the series, winning 15 of 16 matchups from 1955-72, but Oklahoma State flipped the tide with the help of Dokes and White. The Cowboys beat the Razorbacks three straight times while Nutt was evolving into a national recruit as a two-sport star at Little Rock Central.
Nutt eventually chose, with much fanfare, to stay home and play football and basketball for the Razorbacks. Although he became the first true freshman in UA history to start at quarterback, a coaching change led to him leaving Fayetteville.
Long before the transfer portal was a thing, Nutt transferred to Oklahoma State after playing for Lou Holtz his sophomore year. It was a natural landing spot, as both of his parents graduated from the school and his younger brother, Dickey, was already playing basketball there.
However, he admitted that while making that decision, the annual Arkansas vs Oklahoma State game was “in the back of my mind, no question.”
After sitting out the 1978 season and not registering any statistics in the 1979 game, Nutt finally got a chance to play significant minutes against his former school in his hometown as a fifth-year senior.
“I remember not sleeping very well through the week because I was so anxious,” Nutt said. “Little Rock, of course, is one of my favorite stadiums in the world, War Memorial Stadium, because again, from the time I could even remember — 3, 4 years of age — that’s the only stadium I really knew on the collegiate level.”
It wasn’t quite the storybook scenario that played out for Ty Storey nearly four decades later, but he did have some success.
Coming off the bench because of an injury to the starting quarterback, Nutt completed 7 of 8 passes for 85 yards and a touchdown in Oklahoma State’s 33-20 loss to Arkansas.
“When John Doerner went down, I was right next to Jimmy Johnson and I was ready and we had really two good drives,” Nutt said. “Arkansas had already jumped out on us, but we came back, had two good scores, two good drives, and I was excited. But it’s always tough. You’re coming back in there, you’re getting booed at your home state, your home stadium, and it’s like, ‘Uh oh, I’m in the real foxhole now. I got to get ready to go.’ But I was ready to go. I was excited because I expected that because the fans are so passionate.”
Death of the Arkansas vs Oklahoma State Series
That proved to be the last time Arkansas and Oklahoma State played in football. It’s mostly been a mystery as to why the series featured games primarily on the Razorbacks’ home turf and how it went away.
However, Tulsa World columnist Berry Tramel explored the history in a piece published Wednesday morning.
As he so eloquently put it, there was basically a “wink-wink agreement” that helped two legendary figures at the schools. Frank Broyles’ Arkansas football program got another marquee game at War Memorial Stadium, then the superior venue in the state, and it also helped finance Henry Iba’s Oklahoma State basketball program with a healthy payout to the OSU athletic department on an annual basis.
Oklahoma State was definitely more of a basketball school at the time and didn’t draw big crowds for football anyways, so the two coaches/ADs got away with it.
By the time Houston Nutt had wrapped up his playing career, though, Iba had been retired for a decade and Broyles was “growing tired of the series,” Tramel wrote — likely because the Cowboys were getting better in football and were starting to recruit well in the Natural State.
That was a bummer for Nutt, who never got a chance to coach in an Arkansas vs Oklahoma State game.
After starting his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Oklahoma State from 1981-82, Nutt returned to Stillwater as a full-time assistant from 1985-89. While there as a receivers coach, he also coached OSU quarterback Mike Gundy, now the Cowboys’ head coach. He left in 1990 to become the Razorbacks’ wide receivers coach, a role he held for three seasons. In 1998, Nutt replaced Danny Ford as the head coach at Arkansas.
He never stopped thinking of the Arkansas vs Oklahoma State series that meant so much to him growing up. “I wanted that to keep going,” Nutt said. “To me, it made sense. You’re not that far away from each other and it’s such, I thought, a good rival and I was disappointed. I thought it needed to keep going.”
Nutt isn’t alone in that sentiment. Arkansas football coach Sam Pittman — an Oklahoma native — said on Wednesday morning’s weekly SEC coaches teleconference that he believed games like this are “really good for college football.”
Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy, whose oldest son actually graduated from the UA, took it a step further and provided some reasons for why it is such a great matchup during an interview on the Chuck and Bo Show.
“It’s a good game regionally because there’s such crossover,” Gundy said Wednesday morning. “We’ve got a lot of Arkansas high school grads over here. There’s quite a few middle Oklahoma to Eastern Oklahoma high school grads that go to school over there. There’s no reason for us to not play.”
Gundy added that trying to qualify for the expanded 12-team playoff will incentivize these kinds of non-conference games, plus it’s great for fans because it’s easy to make the 3-hour drive between Fayetteville and Stillwater.
Not only that, but Nutt believes the two programs mirror each other.
“When you look at the programs, a lot of times they’re very similar in a lot of ways,” Nutt said. “Oklahoma State can’t get all their players in their state. They share it with Oklahoma and they have to go to Texas to get their players most of the time. And Arkansas, same way, they can’t sign 25 in the state of Arkansas. Of course now with the transfer portal, it’s a whole new way of recruiting, free agency. So I just think it’s good. It’s just a good game, a good rival.”
Assessing Arkansas vs Oklahoma State in 2024
As for the 2024 resumption of the Arkansas vs Oklahoma State rivalry, it is the first major test of the season for both teams after each opened the year with a win over an FCS opponent. (Granted, of course, that the Cowboys played the No. 1 team at that level while the Razorbacks massacred one of the worst.)
There’s a lot at stake, too.
Oklahoma State is ranked No. 16 in this week’s AP Poll and viewed as a contender in the new-look Big 12 with legitimate College Football Playoff hopes. Arkansas, meanwhile, is trying to rebound from a 4-8 season and save Sam Pittman’s job. That latter point makes it arguably the biggest game of Pittman’s five-year tenure.
Houston Nutt, who is in the process of moving from McKinney, Texas, back to Northwest Arkansas, retired from CBS Sports last August to spend more time chasing around his two grandchildren. But he put his broadcaster’s hat back on during his conversation with Best of Arkansas Sports.
“Man, I can’t wait to see this one,” Nutt said. “I’m excited about this one. I spoke at the coaches clinic at Oklahoma State, so I got to see a little bit of them in the spring, and Mike Gundy…he’s done a great job. To be at one place 20 years is phenomenal and he’s got a lot of returning starters.
“But I think Arkansas has upgraded. It’s hard to tell versus UAPB, but when I look at Arkansas, Taylen Green, I look at Ja’Quinden Jackson, I look at the speed at wideout and the offensive line looks better. I’m real curious this week to see how much improvement Arkansas has made and how this game can go.”
Most sports books opened with Oklahoma State as an 8.5-point favorite, but that has since dropped to 7.5. ESPN’s Football Power Index also gives the Razorbacks a 44% chance of pulling off the upset.
“I don’t really know how good Oklahoma State (is),” Nutt said. “They say because of the experience and the returning letterman they have, they’re pretty excited. But man, this is the game that can go either way. I truly believe that it can go either way. It’s the team that makes the fewest mistakes and takes care of the ball and wins the special teams and all those little things right there. That’s why I think this game will be close.”
He didn’t explicitly reveal his rooting interest for Saturday’s game, but Nutt still refers to Arkansas as “we” and something else he said during the interview was also quite telling.
“I had a lot of fond memories as a player, football and basketball (at Oklahoma State),” Nutt said, “but my roots always kind of come back to Arkansas because that’s where I’m from.”
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Other Connections
Separated by only about 185 miles, there are plenty of other connections between Arkansas and Oklahoma State beyond Houston Nutt. Here are a few…
- Nutt’s father, Houston Sr., played basketball at Oklahoma State, which was then known as Oklahoma A&M, in the 1950s. His teammate and roommate? Eddie Sutton.
- Sutton, of course, ushered the Arkansas basketball program into his modern era as the head coach from 1974-85 and later coached at Oklahoma State from 1990-2006. His successor at Arkansas, Nolan Richardson, played for the legendary Don Haskins at Texas Western (now UTEP) and Haskins – during his playing days – was also coached by none other than Henry Iba.
- After sitting out in 1978 because of NCAA transfer rules, Houston Nutt Jr. played his first season at Oklahoma State under first-year head coach Jimmy Johnson – an All-SWC defensive lineman on the 1964 national championship team who later served as the Razorbacks’ defensive coordinator from 1973-76. Oklahoma State was his first head coaching job, going 29-25-3 in five seasons, before rising to fame at Miami (Fla.) and then with the Dallas Cowboys.
- Johnson’s successor was Pat Jones, a Little Rock native who played collegiately at Arkansas Tech and Arkansas before beginning his coaching career as the Razorbacks’ defensive line coach in 1975.
- Jones hired Houston Nutt as an assistant coach at Oklahoma State and is who Nutt credits for him eventually becoming a head coach.
- During his time as a wide receivers coach at Oklahoma State, the Cowboys not only had legendary running backs Thurman Thomas and Barry Sanders, but also a quarterback named Mike Gundy – who has been Oklahoma State’s head coach since 2005.
- Terry Don Phillips played for the Razorbacks as a defensive tackle from 1966-69 and was then a graduate assistant for two years before eventually getting into the administrative side. After serving as a senior associate AD at Arkansas from 1988-94, he was hired as the athletics director at Oklahoma State, a role he held from 1995-2002.
- Former Arkansas sports information director Rick Schaeffer actually graduated from Oklahoma State and worked at the school for a few years before being hired by the UA in 1976 – a job he held for a quarter century. Schaeffer is still part of the pregame radio crew and does radio with 103.7 The Buzz.
- More recently, there have been other transfers between the schools. Fayetteville native Fred Gulley Jr. began his basketball career with the Cowboys before transferring home, while Jayson Jones spent two years with the Arkansas baseball program before heading to Stillwater this summer. Jones followed in the footsteps of Devo Davis, who flipped his commitment from OSU to Arkansas coming out of high school, but joined the Cowboys via the portal after four seasons with the Razorbacks.
- The current Oklahoma State football team also features a pair of former Razorbacks: defensive tackle Collin Clay (played for Arkansas in 2019) and running back AJ Green (played for Arkansas from 2021-23). Green is injured, though, and unfortunately won’t play in Saturday’s game.
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