After three consecutive weeks of Pro Football Hall of Famers making appearances at the Little Rock Touchdown Club, University of Arkansas Athletic Director Hunter Yurachek took his turn at the club’s meeting Monday at the DoubleTree Hotel in downtown Little Rock.

Yurachek spoke for about 30 minutes and offered direct insights on the topics he spoke about, especially with his opinions on the current state of name, image and likeness in college athletics.

“It has been terrible. It’s been awful,” Yurachek said when asked about dealing with NIL as an athletic director. “NIL the way it was intended on July 1 of 2021, that if a student athlete had a value to their name, image or likeness and there was a business product or service that wanted to use a student athlete to market their business, product or service, well (the athlete) could receive valid compensation to do that.”

Yurachek said the intention behind the approval of name, image and likeness is not what is happening in reality. He said the first year went fairly smoothly, but things have changed drastically over the last 2 years.

“In college athletics, we are our own worst enemy,” Yurachek said. “We find the loophole to every single rule in the rule book and we found a loophole where we created these things called collectives. Collectives are donors pooling their resources together to pay student-athletes collectives under the (guise) of doing charitable work.

Yurachek said the issue with collectives is that, unlike a business that will pay fair market value, collectives are paying athletes “outrageous” amounts of money that do not equate to the so-called charitable work that is being done.

“Whether that was tweeting about a charitable organization, or signing autographs, or making public appearances, but the amounts of money that were getting paid were simply ridiculous and still are ridiculous,” Yurachek said. “Collectives aren’t paying market value, they’re just buying teams. That figure has grown to a ridiculous number and athletic directors are charged many times with going out and raising those dollars through various means.”

Yurachek said that Arkansas is not where it needs to be in order to be competitive with the top programs in the SEC. He cited the University of Mississippi as an example, claiming that Ole Miss has about 5,000 members in its football collective, while Arkansas has just 1,000 members at this point.

Outside of his comments on the NIL, Yurachek also cleared the air regarding the high-profile hires of offensive coordinator Bobby Petrino with the football program and Coach John Calipari with the men’s basketball team.

“First and foremost, the Bobby Petrino hire, that is Sam Pittman’s hire,” he said. “I do not hire assistant coaches for any of our sports programs. I helped Sam facilitate that. People are going to speculate that I made (Pittman) hire him and that Bobby is going to be our next head coach, but that’s not at all the case and I credit Sam for not being intimidated by that.”

He added, “(With) Coach Cal, that was my hire. We are serious about being successful in all of our sports and hiring somebody like Coach Cal and making that investment was surely a sign of that.”

Yurachek expressed optimism for both the men’s basketball team and the football team the rest of this season. Arkansas is 2-1 on the year following its 37-27 home win over Alabama-Birmingham on Saturday. The Razorbacks’ SEC slate starts this Saturday when they travel to face the Auburn Tigers at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

“Things change a little bit when you go and start playing in the SEC,” Yurachek said. “If you’ve looked at the polls lately, there’s six SEC teams in the top 10 and nine in the top 25. Going on the road in Stillwater (Okla.) and playing a team like Oklahoma State early in the season (has prepared) us for (conference play).

“I think you will see that our team that played at Oklahoma State will be the one who shows up on Saturday down at Auburn and I think you can expect a great game from the Razorbacks.”

Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek said Monday night that he would be open to moving next season’s Arkansas vs. Memphis football game to Fayetteville if Memphis officials are interested.

“I’d be open to looking at both of our schedules and potentially doing a swap of the dates of the game,” Yurachek said before an appearance at the Memphis Touchdown Club. “If it worked better for them to have the game that was played in Memphis in future years when the stadium is done, I’d be willing to look at moving that game to Fayetteville next year.”

The game is set for Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium on Sept. 20, 2025. It’s part of a two-for-one deal where the Tigers will travel to Fayetteville for games in 2026 and 2028. But the stadium is in the midst of a $220 million renovation that isn’t scheduled to be completed until after the 2025 season.

That means the Arkansas-Memphis game is expected to take place at a limited-capacity stadium. This year’s capacity is 33,691, but that number could be higher by the time next season rolls around. Arkansas fans are expected to travel to the game, and there could be more demand than capacity.

“I just learned of that today,” Yurachek said. “It wasn’t on my mind that the stadium was under construction, that it’s still going to be under construction next season. That’s a two-for-one series, where there are two games in Fayetteville and one in Memphis, so that’s maybe an opportunity if there’s an interest for it to switch the dates of those games and play this game next year in Fayetteville and give Memphis the opportunity to host a game in a future year when their stadium is done.”

Still, Yurachek said he has not yet had any discussions with Memphis officials about the potential to move the game. Memphis has a new AD in Ed Scott, and while Yurachek said he knows Scott, they have not talked since Scott arrived in Memphis.

“I just think regional games are a big deal and should be scheduled, and just make financial sense for both schools,” Yurachek said.

Memphis-Arkansas basketball game up to coaches

Memphis has long wanted to schedule men’s basketball games with Arkansas. The programs met last season in the Battle 4 Atlantis, but that was their first matchup in 20 years.

Memphis coach Penny Hardaway said in April that he was hopeful a regular-season game would happen, especially now that former Memphis coach John Calipari is at Arkansas. Yurachek said he leaves basketball scheduling up to the coaches, but said it would be a “great game.”

“Coach Cal handles his schedule, and I’m sure Coach Hardaway does as well,” Yurachek said. “I think that’d be a great game, and obviously there’s a tie-in with Coach Cal having been here at Memphis. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that game on the schedule in future years, but I’ve had no conversation with anybody at Memphis about that. That’s really Coach Cal’s deal.”

Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jonah.dylan@commercialappeal.com or on X @thejonahdylan

The speaker of Wisconsin’s house of representatives clearly has a well-heeled opponent in Arkansas.

Spoiler alert: It’s real estate titan John Bailey of Little Rock.

Robin Vos has been speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, which is what the Badger State calls its house of representatives, since 2013. He represents a district in southeast Wisconsin, south of Milwaukee.

While Vos is a Republican, he isn’t Republican enough for some folks. Twice this year he has been the target of recall attempts because he rejected calls to decertify President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in the state by a mere 21,000 votes. According to the Associated Press, he further alienated himself from some in his party by declining to endorse an effort to impeach the state’s top election official. 

Both recalls failed because they didn’t get enough valid signatures from Vos’ district as it is currently configured. That doesn’t seem to be because they didn’t have enough money: The two efforts combined reported donations of almost $1.28 million — about $185 for every one of the 6,850 voter signatures that either petition drive needed in order to get the recall on the November ballot. 

What may have been lacking was local buy-in. When the two organizations behind the recall attempts finally filed their financial statements — a month late — at the end of August, it turned out that less than $2,500 came from Wisconsin donors while more than $1.2 million came from Bailey. 

Identified in the paperwork as a philanthropist from Little Rock, we know Bailey as a major shareholder and former CEO of publicly traded BSR Real Estate Investment Trust. BSR owns multifamily residential properties, mostly in Texas but also in Oklahoma City and Little Rock. BSR’s headquarters at 1400 W. Markham St. was listed as the donor’s address.

“This makes it clear this wasn’t a grassroots, volunteer, local effort,” Vos was quoted by The Journal Times in Racine. “It was an out-of-state paid endeavor engineered to pay those who took part in it.” 

Vos was nominated for re-election in the Republican primary last month, getting almost 70% of the vote after his only challenger unofficially withdrew.

It is not clear what would prompt Bailey to invest so much into ousting the Wisconsin speaker — $425,000 to the first recall effort (after an additional $60,000 was returned to him when that effort fizzled) and $785,000 to the second.

Whispers reached out to BSR with no success, and no reporters in Wisconsin seem to have answered the why either.

Bailey isn’t the only Arkansan involved in the efforts to recall Vos. Conrad Reynolds, the retired U.S. Army colonel who has twice sought the Republican nomination for Arkansas’ 2nd Congressional District, worked with both Wisconsin recall committees. 

Reynolds and Bailey were both listed as officers of Restore Election Integrity Arkansas, which abandoned its planned petition initiative to get a paper ballot amendment on this year’s General Election ballot.

Reynolds told Whispers he knew that Bailey was interested in Wisconsin because “it was important to the mission to get their elections right,” but he said he could not speak to Bailey’s motive for donating so much to the Vos recall attempts. Reynold said he had not personally solicited donations to that effort from Bailey or anyone else.