It appears this would have been Arkansas’ game vs. Rice in Little Rock. The fourth-ranked Razorbacks defeated the 15th-ranked Owls 28-15 two weeks after the Powder River Play vs. Ole Miss on the same field.
I think George Walker is No. 44 and Henry Moore is No. 30. Walker scored touchdowns that day on runs of 1 and 38 yards, and a punt return of 78 yards.
Good stuff, I was two years old when this was filmed. Eight years later I was in stands there for my first game. How times fly and change.
The Jack Mitchell era.
Nope. That was Bowden Wyatt, who took the Cadillac he had been given in Fayetteville and drove it to Knoxville to take over the Vomiteers. Mitchell succeeded Wyatt, and recruited my dad.
Brings back memories of riding the school bus all day and evening to journey and return from the Wildcat stadium in El Dorado to WMS to watch the Razorbacks. Free tickets were made available to high school programs and if you could manage to rise after a hard-fought Big Eight Friday night game you could see the likes of Walker and Moore fights against those Texas teams. The 50’s changed South Arkansas allegiances from Baton Rouge to Fayetteville creating a pipeline for talented players such as Foster, Reuter, Gaston, Mooty, Harris, Hines, Brasher, Mooty, and Hines again, Kyster, and all those players in extreme southeast Arkansas. Using NR’s analogous description those were some bumpy rides on never completed Arkansas highways.
I have the Mobile Oil SWC highlight tapes. There are cool stuff on those. It’s the best of the whole season and includes all teams. Not sure who sent me those but I’ve had em for about 20 years.
The film clip was from 1956, the Jack Mitchell era.
I don’t think so. I think Matt is right, it’s the 1954 Rice game. The tweet mislabeled the video. We played Rice in Fayetteville in '56.
And the audio references the 1955 Cotton Bowl and “how we became a champion”. That game is clearly in WMS.
I did not notice the 1956 reference until @scientificrocket pointed it out. I think it’s from the '54 Rice game because Henry Moore did not play in '56. Maybe there was another No. 30 in the backfield that year.
It’s a cool video regardless of the year.
Rice was nationally ranked at the time of that '54 game in WMS, by the way.
Mystery solved: It was the 1954 Rice game. You can see some of the same highlights in this expanded video.
You can also see George Walker’s punt return in this video. The punter was Dickey Meagle, who was most famous for being the ball carrier tackled by an Alabama sideline player the year before at the Cotton Bowl.
In the 1980’s my parents visited me when I was living in Tulsa. I took my father out to one of the public courses to play golf, mother went along to ride in the cart. As we were only a twosome the starter put us together with two other men a who looked a little younger than my father. One introduced himself as Preston Carpenter (aka Mr Powder River Play)! Even though I’m a graduate and a big Hog fan the name meant little to me. But my parents quickly brought me up to date. They went to some games in LR as well as to Memphis to see the Hogs/Ole Miss games, we were from Paragould. That was the highlight of my folks visit to Tulsa. And Mr Carpenter was a very gracious man and a pretty good golfer if I remember.
Great golfer. Powerful. Preston and I became great friends through year. He was in Conway a couple of years and his son played tailback for wampus cats. We watched a lot of practices. He explained the virtues of 4-3 defense as taught to him by Paul Brown.
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