SEC Network host, anchor and reporter Alyssa Lang joined the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Monday morning, becoming only the third woman to fill the guest speaker’s chair. This week’s meeting comes on the heels of a Razorbacks’ victory — and the Hogs’ first win in Gainesville in program history — so in addition to Lang’s all-red attire, LRTDC host David Bazzel broke out his Razorback-bedecked blazer to celebrate.
The morning began with Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Senior Editor Rex Nelson’s recap of the weekend, which saw wins for all of the state’s DI schools. Nelson also took a moment to explain this Saturday’s Battle of the Ravine matchup to Lang, saying that it is “the only college football game in America where the visiting team walks to a road game . . . We’re going to get [College] GameDay there one year for that.”
The conversation opened, naturally, with the Razorbacks’ win over the weekend in Florida. Lang covered the Hogs’ disappointing visits to Arlington and Oxford on Sept. 30 and Oct. 7, respectively, and she acknowledged that familiar, if painful, Razorback fan feeling: so close, and yet so far. Despite the 3-6 record, Lang had plenty of positive things to say about the team and Coach Sam Pittman.
“The one thing that I’ve noticed, not just from this season, but from any Sam Pittman-led team, [is that] this is a team that hasn’t given up. This is a team that keeps fighting, and that’s a really hard thing to do when you get into the month of November, maybe not having had the season that you were hoping,” she said.
Though things only get more challenging for the remainder of November, Lang said the win might be the “shot in the arm” the team needs, adding, “Kenny Guiton deserves all the flowers in the world for calling the game that he had. I feel like this could be, maybe, a spark for Arkansas to finish the year well.”
Lang also noted that teams across the SEC are having difficult years, and although upcoming opponent Auburn has continued to improve over the weeks, she still has the Hogs coming out on top.
“If they can copy that, build off of that, clearly — y’all saw the relationship that Guiton and KJ have — that’s worth a million bucks right there.”
Bazzel then turned the conversation to the fanbase and Lang’s stretch of four games covering the Hogs in 2019 under Chad Morris.
“Even though I went to South Carolina and I’m a Gamecock, I felt like Arkansas was the first fanbase, when I got to the conference and started covering the conference, that I really bonded with,” she said.
And, even though it was a tough time for those fans, she was impressed at their resolve to keep showing up for the team, unhappy as they might have been with the performances.
“This fanbase, it just bleeds Arkansas through and through . . . You know that it just means more in this conference, but… I felt the love that all Arkansas fans have for this football program and for this team.”
Lang also spoke to her start in sports broadcasting and the fact that most of her role models in the industry were men by necessity. It was a high school communications teacher who first put the idea of broadcasting on her radar, and her father had the idea of pairing that skill with her love of college football.
“It kind of dawned on me… I didn’t really have a lot of women doing what I do now. When I turned on ESPN, there were a few, but it just had never crossed my mind until that moment,” she said.
During football season, Lang’s schedule is a dizzying mix of meetings and prep work, with shows throughout the week leading up to Saturday’s game, wherever it may be. Bazzel highlighted a few viral highlights, including a pair of entertaining post-game interviews with former Mississippi State Coach Mike Leach, who urged the currently engaged reporter to elope.
“I would keep it on the down low – which, you failed to do that,” Leach told her in the clip.
Lang has also gained online notoriety for sampling some of the stranger eating habits of Tennessee Titans quarterback Will Levis while he was at Kentucky. Eating a banana with the peel on, she said, was “a little crunchy,” but honestly not bad. Stirring mayonnaise into her coffee, however, prompted a very different response.
“I genuinely thought I was going to throw up on live TV,” she said.
Bazzel ended the conversation by speaking with Lang about her interactions with Razorbacks live mascot Tusk and the Stokes family.
“Keith Stokes was one of the first friends I made, just in the SEC, that showed me what kind of a family this place is… I said this on the air a couple of days after he passed — for us to have the type of stories we have about Keith Stokes, and to be able to talk about him the way that thousands of us across the SEC can, other fanbases included — man, I hope I live a life like he did, for people to be able to talk about me like that,” she said.
Like many of the Touchdown Club’s guests, Lang also had compliments for the work Bazzel and the rest of the team have put in to make it one of the premier touchdown clubs in the country.
“I have been to a lot of touchdown clubs, and they all talk about y’all, and they all talk about how great a job the Little Rock Touchdown Club does,” she said.
Lang joined the SEC Network in 2018 and has hosted the programs SEC Now, Thinking Out Loud and her own program, Out of Pocket, which this year added analyst Takeo Spikes as co-host. She also serves as a sideline reporter for SEC Network college football and basketball and regularly co-hosts on SiriusXM with SEC Network commentators Peter Burns and Chris Doering. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, Lang began her career as a sports anchor at First Coast News in Jacksonville, where she worked for two years before joining the SEC Network.
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