An investigation as to motive might be in order. A lot of other folks’ money probably changed hands as a result of those calls.
Without getting into bookies affecting the outcome of games, in most conferences, the bowl money is split among the schools.
No matter what else happens, Arkansas is not getting a BCS berth. The payout for a BCS bowl is ~$17 million. After that, the purse drops to around 6 million, and lower tier bowl games are $500,000 to 1 million. There’s a lot of financial incentive for these schools to stay in the BCS bowl hunt.
I have believed for a long time that the major conferences give the “benefit of the doubt” to the team that will generate the most money by winning. Basically, in a conference game, don’t expect a close call to go against the higher ranked team.
I think the Pac 10 is an exception to this.