TIMES-REPUBLICAN

EUGENE, Ore. — The Arkansas men’s 4×100-meter relay team dropped the baton in last Friday’s finals of the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships.

The way the Razorbacks rolled on without showing signs of that speed bump is what made them champions.

Scoring 56 points without an individual or relay victory proved to be enough for the top-ranked Razorbacks, who claimed their school’s first NCAA Outdoor title since 2003.

Head coach Doug Case, a Marshalltown native, became the first first-year head coach to sweep men’s Southeastern Conference and NCAA championships since 1982. Case was the associate head coach for seven seasons before replacing 18-year head coach Chris Bucknam, who stepped down on Nov. 5, 2025.

Case, a 1981 Marshalltown High School graduate, still holds the Bobcats’ record in the 100-meter dash (10.6 seconds).

Last week, he led Arkansas to its 11th NCAA Outdoor title.

“It was important and everybody knew it,” said Case. “The guys knew it and the coaches knew it, the administrators knew it, and we were here to fight to win this thing. I can’t say enough about our coaches and our athletes. Great effort across the board.”

The final day of the national championships didn’t start out very well as the Razorbacks were one of four schools that didn’t finish the 4×100. Arkansas qualified seeded second in the finals but dropped the baton on the first exchange.

The Razorbacks didn’t waver.

“It’s not a good way to start any track meet, believe me,” Case said. “But then it was a fight from that point on, and the rest of the team stepped up and just did it.

“That’s part of having a team, right? I’ve been saying all year, we’re good from the 100 to the 10K to the field events. So when something goes wrong, you’ve got backup. We still had 10 scoring opportunities [Friday] when we walked into the meet and I think everybody did a great job. It was a lot of fun.”

Finishing behind the Razorbacks were a trio of SEC schools — Georgia (49), Tennessee (46), and LSU (42) — while the rest of the top 10 included Oregon (40), Auburn (33), Louisville (32), Kansas State (30), Nebraska (28) and USC (27).

Arkansas needed only to finish within six spots of Georgia in the last event of the meet — the 4×400 — and took third while the Bulldogs claimed first.

“This meet is brutal, man, it’s about survival,” Case said, “and everybody brings these great teams, these great individuals in here and you really have to nail it to win this thing. You’ve gotta do a special thing to win this meet.

“It’s just a team effort. It’s a great coaching staff, it’s a great team of athletes, and if you don’t have that you can’t do things like that. It’s tradition here at Arkansas and I’ve been telling the guys we want to keep that going.”

Case is a Northern Iowa graduate who set eight school records between 1982-86 as a Panther trackster. Upon graduating in 1987, Case served as a graduate assistant for two years at UNI. He was the assistant coach at Arkansas State from 1989-95 before taking the head coaching position at Drake (1996-99).

Case joined Bucknam at Northern Iowa in 2000 and served as the Panthers’ associate head coach until 2008. When Buckham took the head coaching job at Arkansas, Case went with him.