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FAYETTEVILLE — Throughout the offseason leading up to his first year as Arkansas’ head coach, Eric Musselman joked - confessed? - that rebounding concerns kept him up at all hours.

Ushering in a new decade and one game into SEC play, it seems like those sleepless nights are paying off for the Razorbacks.

Arkansas still has a negative rebounding margin, sitting at minus-2.77, but it is drastically improved from last year’s minus-4.56. It has yet to dig out of the bottom half of Division I in that category, where it’s been the last decade, but that nearly 40 percent improvement has moved Arkansas from 328th to 290th in the country.

“Not great, but good. Better than I expected,” Musselman said Tuesday when asked to assess his team’s rebounding. “The effort’s been tremendous. I cannot fault at all the effort of guys going to the backboards.”

A better way to look at rebounding, though, is with percentages because there are varying amounts of rebound opportunities from game to game depending on how well teams shoot. For example, there are more chances to grab rebounds when teams miss more shots.

Those statistics show an even more staggering improvement for the Razorbacks.

So far this season, they have grabbed 72.2 percent of their opponents’ missed shots. The NCAA does not include rebounding percentages on its official statistics website, but the SEC does and that defensive percentage has Arkansas firmly in the middle of the pack, sitting at seventh in the conference.