It's about business for the city. The city doesn't want to pony up for upgrades to keep Arkansas, so the claim they can get the same return from UALR. Which is hogwash.

Bluff will be called.

I agree the deep south is different than the rest of the US when it comes to football and spending education dollars on sports. You don't have the student revolts and rejections of fees, the State laws prohibiting transfers, etc. And all the new move ups in football are from this region it seems. It shows up in other Statistics, such as the spending on research at Universities versus the spending on Athletics. While the ratio is 7:1 to 12:1 among schools in the B1G and P12, its down below 2:1 in the SEC, and if you remove the four AAU schools it below 1.5:1. This points to a very different set of priorities.

Given that, the same numbers which would make any Northern or Western public schools say, hell no to adding football, in Arkansas or Alabama or Louisiana they may well say yes.