Woo Pig Sooie: The Razorbacks

The University of Arkansas football team has been called the Razorbacks since around nineteen ten, when a coach compared the team's scrappy style of play to the wild hogs of the Arkansas timberland. The name stuck, and so did the battle cry. The Woo Pig Sooie call, a hog call adapted from the traditional pig-summoning shout used by Arkansas farmers, became the signature cheer, one of the most distinctive and recognizable traditions in college football.

The program's defining era came under Frank Broyles, who arrived as head coach in nineteen fifty-eight. Over nineteen seasons, Broyles compiled a record of one hundred forty-four wins, fifty-eight losses, and five ties, more wins than any other coach in Arkansas history. He won seven Southwest Conference titles.

His nineteen sixty-four team went eleven and zero and claimed a national championship, though the Associated Press had already awarded its title to Alabama that year, making the claim disputed. The Football Writers Association of America and the Helms Foundation recognized Arkansas. The game that defines the Broyles era in most memories is the one his team lost.

On December sixth, nineteen sixty-nine, in Fayetteville, the number-two ranked Razorbacks faced the number-one Texas Longhorns. President Richard Nixon attended. Arkansas led fourteen to nothing into the fourth quarter before Texas scored twice to win fifteen to fourteen.

The game has been called the Big Shootout ever since. Broyles retired from coaching in nineteen seventy-six. He had been athletic director since nineteen seventy-four, a position he held for more than thirty years.

The football complex is named for him.