At halftime of the Arkansas basketball game against Maryland-Eastern Shore on Monday night, I texted my brother, who lives in Salisbury, Maryland, which is about the distance from the UMES campus as Rogers High School is from the UA in Fayetteville. When I told him the score at the break, his response captured more than he probably meant it to, thanks to his overly journalistic and semantic-minded sibling.
“Poor kids.”
Indeed. Maryland-Eastern Shore, one of eight historically black colleges or universities in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, had just 10 players dress against an SEC basketball powerhouse. Arkansas spent about $12 million, give or take, on basketball in the couple years before John Calipari arrived.