FAYETTEVILLE — As he reflected on the regular season Tuesday, Arkansas coach Eric Musselman was briefly taken back to a less-than-pleasant point in time.
Then the No. 24 team in the country and coming off an ugly neutral-floor loss to Oklahoma in Tulsa, Arkansas was a 12 1/2-point favorite entering its meeting with Hofstra in North Little Rock’s Simmons Bank Arena. It was the Razorbacks’ first game in a week.
Before an expectant and hopeful crowd of 14,685 fans, Arkansas’ play could be characterized as disjointed at best. The Razorbacks lost 89-81.
Following the game, Musselman, when asked for the biggest issues facing his team, listed six items in rapid succession.
“That was the low of the lows,” Musselman said Tuesday. “I’ll leave it at that.”
The loss to the Pride was the second in what became a stretch of five defeats in six games. Arkansas, once a top-10 team, plummeted from the national polls. The lone win in that span came against Elon before the holiday break.
The time off, Musselman said, took the Razorbacks out of any rhythm it gained from the 81-55 win over Elon. Then, in the days that followed, guards JD Notae and Chance Moore contracted covid-19, and Notae, the team’s leading scorer, missed the SEC opener at Mississippi State on Dec. 29.
“It affected us coming out the of the gates," Musselman said, “and I thought it affected us for sure in the Vanderbilt game, as well. But as soon as we got back healthy – and we had lost a couple games – I think that the players understood we had to start winning.”
After a home loss to Vanderbilt and road loss at Texas A&M, Arkansas was 0-3 in SEC play and floundering. Sophomore forward Jaylin Williams did not view the team’s slide that way, though.
He described the Razorbacks, with their backs ever against the wall, as a team full of believers. The manner in which the group remained intact is what he is proudest about from the regular season, and it spawned a remarkable run back to national relevance.
“We still believed in each other once we felt like everybody else didn’t,” said Williams, a first-team All-SEC selection by the league’s coaches. “When we were down or we were 0-3 at the beginning of conference, nobody was shook. We all believed in each other.
“We all believed that we could turn this thing around. We still went into every game believing we were the best team on the court.”
More often than not, the results bared that down the stretch. Arkansas won 9 consecutive games, including 8 in a row in SEC play, then 5 of its final 7 over the last 3 weeks of the schedule.
The Razorbacks took down two top-10 teams as well as then-No. 16 Tennessee in Bud Walton Arena. They also grabbed the program's first win at Florida since any player on the roster was born.
“Just all the togetherness (stands out),” said JD Notae, a consensus All-SEC first-team selection. “Just not giving up, sticking with each other through the rough times. We kept on each other every day to get better.”
In Notae’s estimation, the turnaround began when the players themselves took ownership of the ongoing struggles. Collectively, Notae said, they decided to get down to business.
“I felt like once we got there, we all came together,” he said.
Musselman said Arkansas’ 5-game closing stretch, which featured 4 games against teams that finished in the top 5 of the league standings, was the most challenging he has faced as a college coach. The closeness of his team, as well as the star play of Notae and Williams, keyed a critical 4-1 finish.
After putting itself in position to have to wrap up the season with a roar to get back in the conversation from a national perspective, Arkansas rose to meet the challenge.
“I’m pretty sure everybody thought that we were going to do pretty bad through that,” Williams said. “We stay connected as a team, we stayed believing in each other. We proved a lot of people wrong.
“But that's also been our mindset throughout the whole year – trying to prove everybody wrong.”
Williams this week also revealed that he took initiative in attempting to keep things light in the locker room during the Razorbacks’ rough patch. He approached a member of the coaching staff and had a request: Have Musselman present pre-game skits and motivations on a regular basis.
“We were still doing it, we just weren’t doing it as much. Like, he wasn’t bringing in pizza boxes and doing crazy stuff like that, how he has been recently,” Williams said. “We kind of just talked about that, and he just does a good job of doing things like that to where we’re not going into games so uptight and nervous.
“He’s really good at that.”
Williams now feels as if Arkansas is as close knit as it has been all season. And there is no better time for chemistry to reach its peak than the postseason.
“We go out there every game, we’re ready to leave it all out on the court, play offense, defense, whatever it is and just continue to show our fight," he said. "That’s the most incredible thing about it.
"I want to do better than what we did last year, and I'm pretty sure everybody down there in that locker room is thinking the same thing.”