Musselman sets new standard for Arkansas basketball

FAYETTEVILLE -- Two and a half months after losing its fifth game in six tries and dropping to 0-3 in SEC play, Arkansas will play in its second straight Sweet 16.

The Razorbacks got past a pair of double-digit seeds in Vermont and New Mexico State and will now face No. 1 overall seed Gonzaga in San Francisco with a chance to make it back to the Elite Eight.

It’s a position very few expected them to be in after disappointing losses to Hofstra and Vanderbilt. In fact, after losing to Texas A&M to fall to 10-5 overall, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi didn’t even have Arkansas in his “next four out” for the 2022 NCAA Tournament.

“I would say it's great, especially because how we started this year or started our SEC play,” Jaylin Williams said after Saturday’s win. “It's great for the team knowing that we proved a lot of people wrong.

“This whole season for us, it's just been fighting. Everybody just kept fighting, everybody turned into a dog, everybody wanted it bad, so we just kept fighting throughout the whole year.”

That has become a staple of Eric Musselman’s teams at Arkansas.

In his first season, the Razorbacks lost five straight games in February before winning four of their last six to put themselves back in the bubble conversation prior to the pandemic shutting things down.

Last year, Arkansas followed a 2-4 start to conference play — which included back-to-back blowouts at LSU and Alabama — with 11 straight SEC wins to end the regular season. It just about replicated that this year, winning 14 of its final 16 games before the conference tournament despite facing a brutal schedule over the back half of SEC play.

“We were really, really challenged at the end of the year with arguably — and it wasn’t my words — we had as difficult a schedule as anybody in college basketball down the stretch,” Musselman said. “We were able to play as well as anybody down the stretch, so I think it’s a big-time credit to our players that they continue to get better.”