There’s a meme that has been circulating for years where Sam Washington, former head football coach at North Carolina A&T, is feeling all kinds of good in the locker room after a win over a rival, broadly proclaiming among his celebrating players for the administration to “bring me my money.”
Mind you, this was before college football turned into an arms race of who can buy the best team and players were allowed to transfer at will to whatever school gave them the best offer for their services.
Getting the bag, so to speak, is customary for players now as loyalty to a school means next to nothing anymore. It’s all about what that player can put in their bank account before they either exhaust eligibility or move on to the next level, wherever that may be.
Hoping that a player just wants to come to your school because of the facilities or the degree track or because of how good their visit went comes as archaic to so many in 2025.
However, there are exceptions to every rule.
Arkansas Football Signee Did What??
Braylen Russell’s December portal saga was sure to be a topic that came up at many an Arkansas football fan’s table this Christmas. His entering of, redrawing from, entering and redrawing was sure to elicit some conversation, and perhaps a wry analogy to Santa Claus not fully committing to a jump down the ol’ chimney.
The topic of NIL money’s corrosive effect rolled on through into Thursday’s show of “The Buzz” on 103.7 the Buzz, when host Justin Acri mentioned that coaches like Nick Saban and others were getting out of the business because of the ease of players being able to go in and out of the portal and possibly becoming wealthy or millionaires by playing college football.
The guest, Sheridan High football coach Kevin Kelley, interjected he knows of at least one player for whom it’s not all about the Benjamins.
That player is Antonio Jordan of the Warren Lumberjacks, the wide receiver factory located in southeast Arkansas that has been churning out prospects under head coach Bo Hembree for much of the last two decades.
Jordan of course, led the Lumberjacks to a state quarterfinal appearance in 2024 and signed with the Razorbacks earlier this month.
According to Kelley, who won six state titles with the Pulaski Academy Bruins before a college foray and subsequent backtrack into high school coaching, Jordan was offered s sum of $500,000 in NIL by the Texas Longhorns to come play for them. Instead, however, he accepted $150,000 in NIL from Arkansas and will honor his commitment to the Razorbacks.
There are multiple ways to view such a refusal, if it proves to be the actual case.
On the one hand, Texas might have just dangled this to Jordan to see if it would entice him. If he is ultimately had decided to come to Austin, there’s a good chance he may not have gotten on the field right away or, to be brutally frank, ever. Maybe Texas was just like, “We like him, but not enough to really play for us. We just want Arkansas to not get him.”
Theory about Texas Football Stashing Away Talent
It’s kind of like stashing a player in fantasy football on your bench. You really don’t have much intention of putting him in outside of one of your normal starters being on a bye or injured, but you don’t want the rest of your league to have dibs on him.
This may have been Missouri’s modus operandi in taking Courtney Crutchfield last year. The jury is still out on that one. Certainly, if any program is capable of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per years to guys who essentially function like walk-ons because they never touch the field, the Longhorns could do that. This sort of preemptive striking against rival programs is less common nowadays with scholarship limits, but was a regular occurrence before the NCAA implemented restrictions post-Title IX in 1973.
On the other hand, maybe Jordan is just ‘all Hog’ in the same sentence as guys like Darren McFadden and Bobby Portis or even more recently, his Warren counterpart Treylon Burks.
These are the guys who would come play for the Razorbacks regardless of coach, record or situation. Those are the ones you want in your foxhole. They aren’t chasing the biggest payday; they just want to shine under the state’s brightest spotlight.
Also, according to Kelley, Jordan still got a $150,000 payday. Most average Arkansans would very much like to make that in a year, much less to get it in one fell swoop to play football, on top of tuition and room and board.
The hope for Sam Pittman and Ronnie Fouch, the Razorback wide receivers coach, would be that Jordan will like playing for Arkansas so much that he won’t test the transfer portal waters after each season – a practice that’s becoming more and more commonplace.
Arkansas has lost at least one key receiver to the transfer portal in each offseason during the majority of the Pittman era (Michael Woods, Warren Thompson, Ketron Jackson Jr. and Isaiah Sategna), with two of those being in-state products.
They’ll just have to hope that Jordan will stay true to his word and not at some future point pull a Patrick “Judas” Kutas by backtracking on his word. Certainly, they are off on the right foot with Warren’s latest hometown hero.
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Hog Legend Gets Flambéed
Nobody can accuse Quinn Grovey of backsliding on the Hogs. As a three-year starter, the Oklahoma native led the Razorbacks to two Southwest Conference championships and two Cotton Bowl appearances in 1988 and 1990.
As perhaps the first great dual-threat quarterback in program history, Grovey has remained an important part of the Razorback family in the succeeding decades. As the radio color commentator for the Razorbacks, he’s shown he can still represent Arkansas with great passion and fire.
Sometimes, however the fire doesn’t go as planned….
Here’s one of of the most hilarious Razorback stories you will ever see:
Listen to Kelley make the claim about Jordan taking $350,000 less starting at 41:00 below:
Watch highlights of Antonio Jordan here:
More on Arkansas football from BoAS:
