After several days of awaiting the inevitable, news finally broke Thursday that Eric Musselman has taken the USC job and is out at Arkansas after five seasons.
It’s a bizarre end to a mostly-successful run that included two Elite Eights and a Sweet Sixteen.
I’ll step out of the newswriting role for a second to editorialize: that was a really fun five years. Muss was a home run hire who did exactly what he was hired to do: put Arkansas back on the national stage and advance in the NCAA Tournament. It ended sooner than we’d like, but we knew that Muss was a mercenary from the day he was hired. We knew he might leave for the NBA or a major West Coast job. He was a weird cultural fit here but he was also a really good basketball coach at a program hungry for success. Basketball coaches are humans, too, and Muss and his family clearly preferred being out west. He’s definitely going to have some nostalgic thoughts when he sees fewer than 4,000 fans at USC home games next year, but if he’s happy then good for him.
It’s important to note that Musselman, when compared to his predecessor Mike Anderson, had a worse SEC win percentage (.552 vs .528), more losing SEC seasons (two vs three), and the single worst season of the combined 13-year era (6-12 this year). And yet, Muss led the Hogs to their only three Sweet Sixteens since 1996 and only two Elite Eights since 1995, while Anderson never got out of the first weekend.
And the win numbers look different in context when you consider a key reason why Anderson was fired: the SEC was improving, and Anderson wasn’t improving with it. Musselman coached the Hogs in a much stronger SEC. That’s a key part of why he was hired: to advance the program against tougher competition. I’d say he did it well.
The cracks were already there
Muss went 14-22 in SEC play over his final two seasons. Yes, injuries played a role in the 2023 season, but that wasn’t a Final Four team anyway. After his most successful teams were built around native Arkansans, there are now an entire starting lineup’s worth of native Arkansans at schools not in Fayetteville.
When Musselman was hired in 2019, I wrote this over at Arkansas Fight:
At Arkansas, Musselman will have access to a much deeper talent pool, as Arkansas’ high school basketball punches well above its weight, producing at least one, and often two or three SEC-caliber players each year. Land those, and fans probably won’t mind if the Hogs supplement the rest of the roster with a well-planned transfer strategy. The primary way things could go awry is if Musselman frays relations with Arkansas’ high school coaches and the in-state talent starts to flee the state. That could be the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” for the Musselman era, so it’s worth watching.
Part of the legacy of Eddie Sutton, Nolan Richardson, and decades of good basketball is that Arkansas is a good basketball state. The game is played all over and solid players who naturally lean to the Hogs are produced every year. Part of the advantage Arkansas has over other school is not only the history and the fanbase, but also the natural recruiting ground. You can’t fill out your entire roster with natives, but you’re basically guaranteed to get at least one solid contributor per year. This seemed like the perfect spot to do what I described above: take the top in-state talent and supplement with transfers.
That’s exactly what Musselman did at first, building a team around Moses Moody in 2021 with key role players like Jalen Tate and Justin Smith being transfers. In 2022, Jaylin Williams stepped up to team leader while role players like Stanley Umude and Au’Diese Toney filled transfer spots. I guess that’s what Musselman was trying to do in 2023, but Nick Smith got hurt, and the staff signed too many freshmen that weren’t Year One-ready.
Now, a calendar year later, we’re looking to head into the 2024-25 season without a single native Arkansan on the roster. KK Robinson and Derrian Ford are starters at smaller schools, Joseph Pinion is moving on, Devo Davis and Layden Blocker are getting SEC interest as transfers, and the top in-state prospect is committed to Mizzou. All of those were/are four-star recruits. Canary in the coal mine, insdeed.
Now what for Arkansas?
Best of luck to Musselman. He wanted to be on the West Coast, now he is. I hope he does well but I won’t follow him too closely or anything.
Arkansas now has to make a big hire. You basically have nobody on the roster for next year, which is the risk of having Musselman as your coach. There’s nothing to build on in terms of year-over-year talent. Arkansas is still one of the top jobs in the SEC, with fan interest, facilities, high school talent, and NIL funding that’s ahead of most other SEC schools.
For candidates, the biggest name would be Ole Miss’s Chris Beard, long a favorite of fans and boosters since his successful year at Little Rock. That would take big money, but Arkansas is a much better program than Ole Miss and would have a chance to get it done. If Beard says no, Kansas State’s Jerome Tang, a former Scott Drew assistant, would be a nice hire, though prying him from Kansas State wouldn’t be easy. McNeese’s Will Wade would be controversial, but he’s definitely a good coach, and the new world of NIL makes his past offenses slightly more excusable.
We will look at and evaluate more candidates in the coming days, but those are the three big candidate you’ll see on every list. With the portal open, Arkansas must move very fast here. All indications are that Hunter Yurachek knew this was coming and the job won’t be open for very long, so buckle up.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.
The latest from Fayette Villains, straight to your inbox
Enter your email to subscribe and receive new post alerts and other updates. You can unsubscribe at any time.