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FAYETTEVILLE — The salary pool for Arkansas’ assistant basketball coaches dropped significantly with the two changes made this offseason.
New assistants Gus Argenal and Keith Smart will each make $200,000 annually, according to offer letters obtained by HawgBeat through a Freedom of Information request. That is the same salary as Clay Moser, who is entering his third season on head coach Eric Musselman’s staff.
The trio of assistants will make a combined $600,000 for the 2021-22 season, which is a 29.4 percent decrease from last season’s salary pool, which was $850,000 before factoring in pandemic-related pay cuts.
However, the overall pay for Arkansas’ basketball staff will still increase because Musselman received a substantial raise after leading the Razorbacks to the Elite Eight in just his second season with the program.
While the UA is saving $250,000 on the assistant coaches, it is now paying its head coach $4 million annually - up from his $2.5 million salary the last two years.
It is also worth noting that Argenal and Smart are replacing two assistants who were head coaches before coming to Arkansas.
Corey Williams joined the Razorbacks after a six-year run as the head coach at Stetson. As part of Musselman’s first staff, he was making $250,000 annually. He left for a similar job at Texas Tech, but the Red Raiders are paying him $400,000, according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
David Patrick came to Arkansas after a successful two-year stint as UC-Riverside’s head coach. It took a $400,000 salary to lure him to Fayetteville as the Razorbacks’ associate head coach and he would have received a total of $1 million had he stayed the full two years of his contract because it also included a $200,000 retention bonus.
Instead, Patrick left after just one season to take a similar position on Porter Moser’s staff at Oklahoma. His salary with the Sooners is not yet known.
Although the Razorbacks’ two new assistants have head coaching experience on their resumes, neither have done so at the Division I level.
Argenal was the head coach at Cal State-East Bay, a Division II program, for four seasons before joining Musselman’s staff at Nevada and spent the last two years as an assistant at Cal State-Fullerton.
Similar to Musselman, Smart has an extensive background at the professional level. Over the last two decades, he’s been the head coach of three different NBA franchises for parts of four seasons and also had several stops as an assistant in the NBA. This will be his first Division I job of any kind, though.
