Howdy - and welcome to SB Nation's new blog about the Arkansas Razorbacks.
If by chance you weren't one of the millions, thousands, hundreds, multiple people who visited our previous site - RazorbackExpats.com - each day, please allow us to introduce ourselves ...
First off, our names are John Slater and Stephen Ursery.
When we grew up in Little Rock in the 1980s, few things gave us more pleasure than Razorbacks sports. Whether we were watching Alvin Robertson on the hardwood or Quinn Grovey on the gridiron, we were captivated in the way that kids everywhere are captivated when watching their athletic heroes. When the Hogs won, we were joyous; when they lost, crestfallen.
In the early 90s, we both moved out of the state (barely) to attend the same college in Memphis, Tenn. You might think that the obsession would have waned; on the contrary, it exploded. Encountering lots of people who didn’t like the Hogs – even some who (horrors!) hated the Razorbacks – our fandom kicked into overdrive. It also didn’t hurt that our small liberal arts college’s teams competed in the NCAA’s Division III and thus invited no real interest and that the Arkansas basketball team was enjoying the greatest half decade in its history.
After graduation, one of us ended up in San Francisco, the other in Atlanta. In the midst of establishing careers and building new lives in new places, following the Hogs fell off the radar a bit.
About three years ago, however, we felt ourselves being drawn back to our boyhood obsession. While trading e-mails about Darren McFadden’s Heisman candidacy, Houston Nutt’s various trials and tribulations, and the university’s often tragic and comic search for a new basketball coach, we rediscovered the way Arkansas athletics can so thoroughly captivate, frustrate and, especially, amuse us.
Thus, in August 2007, RazorbackExpats.com was born — just in time for more of Houston Nutt's trials and tribulations and the university's ooften tragic and comic search for a new football coach. And now, we're proud to join SB Nation by launching ArkansasExpats.com (we'll pause to let you compose yourself ... ).
We and our contributors - KevinHog, J. Hawg 3, The Hog Blogger and Whit E. Knight - try to talk about the Hogs in a spirit of good humor, balance and perspective. We don't file Freedom of Information requests for coaches’ cell phone records, and we don't have strokes over Willy Robinson's defensive schemes (maybe that's because, frankly, we're not terribly knowledgeable about them). We aim for lighthearted commentary, walks down memory lane, and Q&A's with former Hogs and the journalists covering the Razorbacks.
Whether you're someone who followed our old site or are reading us for the first time, we hope you'll stop by - and chime in - often. And don't limit your participation to the comment threads: the FanPost feature on the right side of the page allows you to make your own blog posts about the Hogs, and the FanShot feature lets you upload videos and pictures of the Razorbacks.
Before we go, we'd like to send a quick but much-deserved thanks to Chris Haines, Joel Hollingsworth, Tyler Bleszinski and the rest of the SB Nation crew for making our transition so easy and enjoyable. Thanks to their efforts, all of the posts from our former site have been moved over here and are ready for your perusal.