I miss? Sitting in those old metal bleachers at Razorback Stadium back when it was still called War Memorial part of the time, feeling that whole place shake when we stuffed somebody on fourth down. I can still hear the echo of the band playing the fight song off that old horseshoe end zone before they renovated everything into a cookie-cutter bowl. We used to pack 50,000 people in there and it sounded like 100,000 because the noise had nowhere to go. Now they put in all these club seats and luxury boxes and half the crowd is checking their phones instead of watching the kickoff.
The spring game this year was fine I guess, all these transfer kids running around trying to learn the system, but it does not feel like home anymore. Back in the early 90s you could walk up to the fence after practice and shake hands with the players. They lived in the dorms, they ate at the training table, they were part of Fayetteville. Now they are rental cars. You cannot tell me a kid who just showed up in January cares about the tradition of running through that A on the hill the same way a four-year guy did.
I will go watch us play North Alabama on that Thursday night and I will cheer just as loud as I did when we beat Texas in 1981, but my heart is always gonna be in those old bleachers with the peeling paint and the guy selling boiled peanuts in the parking lot. That was real football. This is just business.