Should SEC Contraction Come, Razorbacks Nowhere Near Chopping Block

Numbers suggest Arkansas highly valuable for conference, raise concerns about one particular public university should someone need to be culled

Author:
Kent Smith
Publish date:
May 31, 2023 4:59 AM EDT

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Arkansas Razorbacks

College football analyst Joel Klatt was cited in a Sports Illustrated story earlier this week as saying that at some point the talk involving conferences will no longer be about expansion, but will instead become about contraction as super conferences look to cull dead weight leaching off their more successful brethren. While this may make Arkansas fans uneasy because fans in other areas of the SEC lack the facts needed to quantify the value of the Razorbacks to the league, there are plenty of numbers to suggest Arkansas is more than safe should a purge occur.

Let's start with a number Arkansas athletics has been promoting rather heavily these last few days – 53. That's the number of SEC regular season titles the Razorbacks have claimed over the past decade. It's seven more than the next closest team, Florida, with 46. It's 50 or more championships than Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Missouri. Get used to that last name because it's going to come up quite a bit.

The Razorbacks averaged over 73,000 per home football game last year despite having to play in War Memorial, driving down the yearly numbers by quite a bit. If the Little Rock games were dropped there would be a sizable gap between the Hogs and five other SEC teams. However, with it factored in, the Razorbacks fall just short of passing South Carolina while easily outpacing the much smaller attendance at Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Kentucky and Missouri.

In terms of college basketball attendance, Arkansas finished third in the country and second in the SEC, falling 300 tickets per game behind Kentucky. Only Tennessee also appears in the Top 30, meaning the other 11 teams averaged roughly half or less of the average attendance at Bud Walton. It should also be noted that over the past three seasons, the Razorbacks have advanced as far or farther than any SEC school in the NCAA Tournament.

On the college baseball front, while there isn't a formal list for average baseball attendance numbers for the current season, the Razorbacks led the nation last year with 10,376 fans per game. For those keeping score, that means Arkansas baseball is drawing more than a lot of the SEC basketball programs. To put it perspective, No. 5 in college baseball is Texas with 6,915 fans per game.

As far as television ratings go, Arkansas is the gold standard in basketball. If a team can draw 1 million, that is considered really good. While it's a bit harder than football to find solid numbers, we do know that Arkansas vs. Kansas drew 9 million this year, nine times what is considered good. The game against Kentucky last season brought in 3 million viewers.

Even in the world of college softball, Arkansas is setting the standard for viewers. When the Razorbacks took on LSU, Courtney Deifel's team blew the doors off with 355,000 viewers. For perspective, that's about 150,000 short of Auburn vs. Mississippi State in football. Indiana vs. Michigan St. in Big Ten football drew 369,000. If an athletic program can even draw numbers with softball, it's got something.

As for football, Arkansas is No. 21 in average viewership at 1.8 million, stuck in the middle of a group that includes Texas A&M and Auburn barely above and Ole Miss and Oklahoma barely below with roughly 100,000 viewders separating them. This is despite having been saddled with four games on the SEC Network and one on ESPN+. Anyone who has had to stay at a hotel in Texas, Northwest Arkansas or southern Missouri know that the SEC Network is a rare find on the sets in their rooms. As for ESPN+, only a small percentage of Razorback fans can access it.

Arkansas vs. Cincinnati opened the season as a Top 10 game at 2.9 million opposite Georgia and Oregon. That was essentially the same number as Florida vs. Utah in primetime. The following week the Razorbacks found themselves 30,000 views short of another Top 10 finish with a game against South Carolina. However, it would have finished much higher had the Texas vs. Alabama game that came down to the wire not syphoned off so many viewers. Two weeks later, Arkansas vs. Alabama took the week's highest ranking with just short of 6 million viewers, topping the Tennessee-Florida game that won the week before by 300,000. The week prior, Arkansas and Texas A&M locked up in Arlington in front of 3.5 million viewers. When the Razorbacks played LSU without a starting quarterback late in the season, it still drew 3.6 million.

As for baseball, we are limited on numbers, but the Arkansas vs. Oregon State finals in 2018 were the second highest ratings for the College World Series over the past decade with 1,96 million viewers. Three games between Arkansas and Ole Miss averaged between 1.49 million and over 1.63 million. A game against Auburn drew over 1.1 million. To put this in perspective, a NASCAR race series on NBC in June of last year drew 1.6 million viewers.

As it's easy to see, through any metric, the Razorbacks are more than safe as a valuable member of the SEC. The school that appears to be in most danger would be Missouri. They are last in SEC titles with two and set a low bar for viewership with their game against New Mexico State on ESPNU in a November primetime slot that only managed 63,000 viewers. The only time Missouri drew a respectable number was when Arkansas dragged the Tigers into the Top 10 the final week of the regular season with 3.57 million viewers. Not even Florida, which appears in the Top 10 of most watched college football games a few times, could come close to that despite dramatically increasing Mizzou's viewership to 488,000 for their game back during Week 6.

The TIgers' home football attendance was only 54,000 in 2022. However, that's a huge leap from the paltry 46,000 Missouri averaged in 2021. The only worse team was Vanderbilt with 29,000, which is up from 23,000 the year before. However, Vandy has six more SEC championships and the distinction of being the private school that protects the league from Freedom of Information requests when it's convenient. As for Ole Miss and Mississippi State which also struggle with attendance, championships and ratings outside of baseball, they've been in the SEC forever. It's unlikely they would ever face the chopping block.

Fortunately for Missouri, the SEC tends to be very loyal and wants to expand the basketball brand. However, with Texas coming into the fold, who knows what trouble is about to start up over the coming years.