Imagine, if you will, some time in the 2030s when Ohio State and Arkansas have agreed to a home-and-away series. It’s a marquee matchup played out early in the season that commands the national spotlight, the kind of thing that Georgia, Clemson and LSU do regularly now. For the Buckeyes and Razorbacks, this seems like a win for all parties involved.
Now imagine the leaders at Ohio State, which gets to host the first game, decide that it’s going to honor one of its many past great players during halftime of Hogs-Buckeyes. They choose from plenty of candidates, since a program that essentially pumps out an All-American or two every year has no shortage of worthy possibilities.
But of all the possible honorees, the Ohio State brass decides to honor KJ Hill when Arkansas comes to town.
Yes, that KJ Hill. The same former No. 1 recruit in the state of Arkansas who spurned the Razorbacks in 2015 for the Buckeyes, becoming Ohio State’s all-time leader in receptions while there.
Hill’s departure was a big blow to the Arkansas football program and just another nail in the cobweb-filled coffin bridging the Bret Bielema and Chad Morris eras.
It’s one of the more embarrassing misses in Razorback recruiting history, and anybody with half a brain would see Ohio State choosing to rub it in the face of Arkansas during Razorbacks week – of all weeks – as an insult.
It turns out this isn’t quite a 100% hypothetical scenario.
Arkansas vs Oklahoma State’s Sneaky Ceremony
On Saturday, Arkansas lost a gut-wrenching double-overtime game to Oklahoma State and a situation not too far from the above unfolded when Leslie O’Neal was honored at halftime. The Oklahoma State Cowboys’ all-time leader in sacks became the fifth member of the Cowboy Football Ring of Honor and its first inductee from the defensive side.
A two-time All-American, O’Neal went on to become of the most successful NFL Arkansans of all time while wreaking havoc for the Chargers. A six-time Pro Bowler, the defensive end/linebacker finished his pro career with 132.5 sacks, tying the legendary linebacker Lawrence Taylor in the process.
Like Hill, O’Neal is a central Arkansas native. He didn’t have quite as dominant of a prep career as Hill while starring at Little Rock Hall High in the early 1980s, but he got awfully close. He was somewhat on the skinny side in high school so wasn’t considered a sure-fire blue-chipper.
It’s possible that Arkansas, then under Lou Holtz, didn’t pursue him as hard as other programs did.
When the Arkansas football coaches did come to him, though, they didn’t exactly make a winning argument. “They told me it was my duty to be a Razorback and not to go out of state,” he told Wadie Moore in the May 5, 1986 issue of the Arkansas Gazette.
The coaches as well as others in the community “said that if I went away that my parents would never get to see me play, and the people back home would never hear about me. I took that as a challenge.”
In another part he added, “I probably would have gone to Arkansas, if [the Razorback coaches] would have only said that they wanted me. That was important.”
Razorback coaches saying or doing the wrong thing would also sabotage Arkansas’ shot at getting KJ Hill decades later.
In Hill’s case, the recipe for disaster was way too much pursuit mixed with a splash of overreaching. Bret Bielema, then the Arkansas football head coach, apparently called Chris Ash, then an Ohio State coach as well as a former Razorback assistant, and left a voicemail saying “Hey Chris, Bret. Just wanted to let you know that K.J. is going to cancel his official this weekend. I just wanted to apologize but he’s not going to come.’”
Zach Smith, the former Ohio State receivers coach telling the story, then said this tipped KJ Hill over to the Buckeyes.
“We got K.J on the phone, got his dad on the phone,” Smith said. “They were irately pissed at Arkansas. ‘You don’t speak for my son, you don’t speak for me.’ He came on his visit and basically he was done with Arkansas.”
Leslie O’Neal Not to Blame
To be clear, I’m not insinuating that Leslie O’Neal played a role in OSU’s apparent affront to Arkansas. He’s proud of his home state and in his interview with Wadie Moore said he was especially proud of the way that Frank Broyles, the legendary Razorback athletic director/college football broadcaster, specifically made a point that O’Neal hailed from Little Rock in the OSU games he would call.
From his perspective, it was likely nice to have ceremony on the Arkansas weekend because it gave even more motivation for so many of his friends and family from his home state to visit. It’s a “more the merrier” sort of vibe.
O’Neal isn’t the one to blame here. No, this is at the feet of the Oklahoma State athletic department. The OSU brass has already honored four former Cowboy greats in Thurman Thomas, Barry Sanders, the late Bob Fenimore and Terry Miller.
While Fenimore was a native Okie, consider that while Thurman Thomas is from Houston, Texas, he was inducted into the Cowboys Ring of Honor when Oklahoma State played West Virginia.
Miller grew up in Georgia and Colorado, but was honored in a game vs Kansas.
Sanders is from Wichita, Kansas, was inducted into the ring of honor vs TCU.
So at no point in the past had OSU made a point to honor one of their greats in a game vs a program from that legend’s home state. That makes scheduling O’Neal’s induction vs Arkansas for a game in which OSU was the clear favorite according to foreign-licensed betting sites look even more suspect. I don’t buy the argument this is all a random coincidence, either.
Arkansas vs Oklahoma State recruiting
In recent years, the Oklahoma State football program has made progress in its recruiting but maintaining that success will become even harder now that Texas and Oklahoma have joined Arkansas in the SEC. Most of the best recruits it goes after will need to choose between playing in the Big 12 or the SEC, and from a competitive standpoint there’s little comparison.
That played out on Saturday as Oklahoma State is considered a top team in the Big 12 and Arkansas – at least year – was a bottom-tier SEC team. The Cowboys eking it out (the game was much closer than the 39-31 score indicated) only goes to show where the Big 12’s best rank in the SEC hierarchy.
With recruiting only becoming more competitive, it’s little wonder that Oklahoma State would look for every advantage it can. A halftime showcase of an Arkansas native who left his state and became a legend donning the orange and black can also do double-duty as free advertising on the recruiting front.
In the current cycle, the class of 2025, the Razorbacks were set to host Kameron Powell, a three-star wide receiver out of McKinney, Texas, but he visited the Cowboys first and committed before ever taking the trip to Fayetteville.
Oklahoma State also tried landing a pair of offensive line teammates from Owasso, but managed to land only one of the in-state targets, Ryker Haff. The reason it went 1 for 2? Because Arkansas swooped in with an offer to Blake Cherry and landed him.
Looking ahead to 2026, the Razorbacks made a dent in the Cowboys’ in-state recruiting efforts by securing not one, but two big-time recruits from the Sooner State in four-star defensive end Colton Yarbrough and high three-star safety Adam Auston on the same day. Both of them had Oklahoma State in their top five, but chose to leave the state.
Going back just a couple years, Oklahoma native Luke Hasz chose to leave the state and play for the Razorbacks. On Saturday, he had two catches for 46 yards and a touchdown, but his blocking played a big role in Arkansas racking up 232 yards on the ground.
Hasz said this week that despite having a lot of friends at OSU and visiting the stadium multiple times, he didn’t consider them as a top college option. That’s an embarrassing admission for OSU folks to hear.
Maybe one day, in an Arkansas vs Oklahoma State matchup in Fayetteville years from now, Arkansas can pay the Cowboys back for this Saturday’s Leslie O’Neal event with a ceremony honoring Luke Hasz.
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Andrew Hutchinson contributed to the above
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