There was once a time when sports editors wrote novels and they ran in newspapers. It was a fascinating time in sports journalism.
My father, Orville Henry, seemed to write about almost every play during the time Frank Broyles led Arkansas to the college football mountaintop in the early 1960s. Bill Connors was doing similar stuff with his long game columns in the Tulsa World.
And, now and then, Connors would dive into a series of stories that might last for an entire week. His five-part series on Broyles when the Arkansas coach was at his pinnacle arrived in my mailbox this week, courtesy of Hawgs Illustrated subscriber Don Warr.
The Connors columns started on the front page, jumped inside and filled up another page. There were five parts in the series with comments from Broyles and most of his top aides. There must have been 10,000 total words.
It was wonderful stuff at a wonderful time in Arkansas football. It ran two weeks after the Hogs wrapped up their second straight perfect regular season in December 1965. They had won the national title in 1964 and had won 22 straight games ahead of a loss to LSU in the Cotton Bowl.
Warr had written an email from his home in Midland, Texas, asking for my home address. I’m thankful for his attempt to find a home for a treasure trove of great stories – both by Connors and my father.
They arrived the night before my spring advance phone interview with Sam Pittman, now the second-year Arkansas coach. I couldn’t wait to relay to Pittman a few lines from the Connors columns on Broyles.
Broyles had been given a raise that year to $25,000. Pittman’s salary (not counting a 10% cut accepted by coaches because of budgetary moves related to covid-19) is $250,000 each month.
Told what Broyles made, Pittman was stunned. All he could think was that Broyles is responsible for what UA coaches are paid today.
“What I know is that they don’t put a statue in front of a building named for you unless you earned it,” Pittman said. “What a great person, what a great leader. I was around him briefly a couple of times as an assistant coach here (from 2013-15). Oh, what a great aura you got from him.”
Connors interviewed Barry Switzer, then a Broyles assistant, to learn some of the inner workings of the UA practices and game management. Switzer explained that detailed execution was the Broyles key. Simplicity was a strength, but technique was always perfect.
Broyles felt pride after a 31-0 victory over Rice when the opposing coach shook his hand and told him, “You beat us with four plays. That’s all you ran today.”
“That was a compliment to our execution,” Broyles said.
Pittman said the game has changed with more complexity, “but it still comes down to execution. There is just so much more detail schematically today.”
The other major difference between 1965 and now is the size of the players. The Hogs won with small, quick players in 1959-62, but began to get bigger linemen and backs to set up the string of 22 straight victories. Tackle Glen Ray Hines was massive at 6-7, 260 for the championship Arkansas teams in 1964-65, but would be small today.
Jim Lindsey and Harry Jones, the wingbacks on the 1965 team who both played in the NFL, were 200-pounders with great speed and quickness. They were bigger than the linemen who won for Broyles five seasons earlier.
Under Broyles, the Hogs evolved from light and quick to big and quick — and that was in the lines and the backfield.
“We would not play a big man who could not move,” Broyles told Connors.
Bingo, said Pittman, the former offensive line coach who wants massive players as a head coach, but will not play anyone who can’t move.
“Quickness is so important,” Pittman said. “It’s 100% true today. You have to be able to move your feet. I want our team to get bigger, but not without maintaining quickness.”
In Connors’ 1965 series, Broyles said he was wrong for some of his decisions in his early years at Arkansas. Among his notable poor judgments:
If he had a chance to coach Lance Alworth again, he would have played him at quarterback so the ball could be in his hands more.
After losing the first six games in his first season at Arkansas, Broyles thought he would be unemployed soon. Watching a much bigger Texas A&M team warm up in game seven with line coach Dixie White, Broyles said, “I was so worried about A&M’s size that I wondered if we could ever win enough to hold our jobs. Dixie said, ‘I’m afraid not.’” The Hogs won that day and three more to end the season and they were soon dominating the Southwest Conference.
Broyles resisted when defensive coordinator Jim Mackenzie wanted to move to the press box after the victory over Texas in 1964. Mackenzie talked his way off the sideline and into the booth. The Hogs shut out their final five opponents in the regular season.
Coaches thought Arkansas won on defensive scheme, but Broyles said they were wrong. Pointing to different systems at Georgia Tech and Alabama. He said, “Tech, Alabama and Arkansas do it with different defensive systems, but they play the same way. They use quickness to swarm the ball.”
There was some Bear Bryant in the Arkansas schemes. That was because Broyles hired Jerry Claiborne from Bryant’s Texas A&M staff to coordinate his Missouri defense. Claiborne insisted that Mackenzie should be hired from Blinn Junior College in Bryan, Texas — the best package deal ever, wrote Connors.
How big? Connors wrote it was the “biggest bonus since a theatrical agent discovered George Burns was not as funny as his wife.”