Next five in the 25 Things to Know

November 7, 2014

While the University of Arkansas is on spring break, ArkansasRazorbacks.com is giving viewers a chance to learn more about Arkansas Athletics with a special series of 25 Things About the Arkansas Razorbacks You Might Not Know. For the five days, we’ll have installments of five different noteworthy factoids about Arkansas Athletics.
Day 1
:
Wired Razorbacks ||
Day 2: We’re Top 25 ||
Day 3: Arkansas and the SEC
Day 4: A Mascot Like No Other ||
Day 5: America’s Best Facilities

#6 – Top College Sports Town Forbes Magazine listed the top 10 college sports towns in America, and Fayetteville and the Razorbacks ranked sixth in the country. The ranking was based on quality of life, business climate, cost of living and the feel of living in college town. Forbes started its list by looking at the top 50 teams in the NACDA Director’s Cup (see Thing #8 just below), then factored in housing costs and quality of life measures from other Forbes rankings – notably ranking 12th in quality of life which includes crime rate, cost of living and local school performance. Just to prove it’s no fluke, Forbes also just ranked Fayetteville No. 4 on its list of Best Places for Business and Careers on its large metro list.
	#7 – Best Place to Live, Work and Play Kiplinger’s Best Places to Live, Work and Play in 2008 named Fayettteville to its top 10, labeling us as “Fayetteville’s Funky Green Valley.” The financial website gave high marks to Fayetteville as a unique town with a great balance of business, university town culture and natural beauty. To see more on how Kiplinger picked Fayetteville, jump to their survey page or look at the video made by the Kiplinger folks.
#8 – A Top 25 Program Arkansas Athletics is more than one team – it’s a 19-sport, broad-based program that inspires success on the field and off the field from the over 450 student-athletes in the program. The best example of that was last season’s NACDA Director’s Cup which put Arkansas at No. 24 among the 300-plus members of Division I. The scoring in the Director’s Cup is based on the NCAA performance of 10 men’s and 10 women’s sports. That’s a huge point – each school’s 20 best national finishes make up the Director’s Cup score. Perennial winner Stanford has over 30 teams to pick for its 20 best. All 19 Razorback teams count every season. In fact, Arkansas doesn’t get to count both indoor and outdoor track – only the best finish of the two – so every year, the Razorbacks have 17 teams. Of the 24 teams ranked ahead of the Razorbacks, all but one has 20 or more varsity sports.
	#9 – Healthiest Housing Market for 2009 This is no small award for 2009 with the economic difficulties in the country, but Builder Online picked Fayetteville as the ninth healthiest housing market in the country. At first, doesn’t sound like a big deal – but look at who the other cities on the list include. Fayetteville ranks just ahead of #10 Washington, D.C., #11 Nashville and #12 Denver. Who is Fayetteville right behind? Indianapolis was #8 and Seattle was #7. In fact, the only other “college” towns ahead of Fayetteville were Raleigh, N.C. at fifth and Austin, Texas, at second. To learn more about this ranking for our area, jump to their website at Builder Online.
#10 – More Top 10 Rankings The City of Fayetteville maintains a website with all the current national rankings earned by the home of the Hogs. Fayetteville has a long tradition of scoring top 10 in “Best Places to Live” and “Best Places” listings starting all the way back with the old Rand McNally listings. Just a few of the current high rankings for Fayetteville were on this list. If you want to see more about what’s happening in Northwest Arkansas, jump to Fayetteville.com and see why the unofficial motto is “Keep Fayetteville Funky.” .