Arkansas hires Eric Musselman of Nevada to be its basketball coach
RENO, Nev. -- Arkansas has hired Eric Musselman to be its next head basketball coach.
Arkansas director of athletics Hunter Yurachek announced the hire with a tweet on Sunday.
Musselman, along with wife Danyelle, daughter Mariah and sons Michael and Matthew, appear alongside Yurachek wearing Razorbacks shirts. Michael, who was a graduate assistant this past season with Nevada, presumably will move.
Musselman led the Wolf Pack to a 110-34 record in four seasons with Nevada, along with a CBI Tournament championship, three NCAA Tournament berths and one Sweet 16 appearance. His win percentage of .7638 outpaces the records of illustrious college coaches including Bill Self, Rick Pitino and Jim Boeheim.
But Musselman's win percentage and string of postseason appearances came in the mid-major Mountain West Conference. Other than Nevada, the conference has sent just two other squads to the 68-team NCAA Tournament in the past four years — and both of those teams received automatic bids for winning the MW tournament.
Musselman faces a much tougher task in Arkansas' Southeastern Conference. Seven of the conference's 14 teams made the NCAA Tournament this year, and six appeared in the AP Top 25 at least once this season. Musselman compiled a 2-3 record against AP Top 25 teams in his four seasons at Nevada.
Arkansas won the national championship in 1994.
Nevada's next head coach faces a daunting task as well. The Wolf Pack is losing seven seniors from its 2018-19 team, including Jordan Caroline, Caleb and Cody Martin, Trey Porter and Tre'Shawn Thurman.
ESPN first reported Sunday morning that talks between Musselman and the Arkansas Razorbacks had advanced to the negotiation stage, according to unnamed sources.
Initial rumblings of the move first surfaced on Tuesday. Jeff Goodman, a basketball analyst with the sports network Stadium, posted a tweet on Tuesday morning calling Musselman a "serious candidate" for Arkansas' head coach position.
Goodman noted later Tuesday morning that Musselman was just one of several candidates for the Arkansas job, according to his source.
Trey Schaap, on-air host with Little Rock, Arkansas sports radio station KABZ, posted a tweet that afternoon saying that Musselman already was in Fayetteville making a campus visit. But Musselman's wife Danyelle dismissed those reports Tuesday afternoon.
"He's here in Reno with no plans to go anywhere," Danyelle said in a text message to the RGJ.
"Twitter created this rumor and boy did it spread," Danyelle Musselman said in an interview with the Reno Gazette Journal.
Musselman brought Nevada basketball back to the national spotlight, and UNR President Marc Johnson said Tuesday that the university wanted to work to retain his services.
"We talk to him all the time, but it's an extremely competitive marketplace, and there are different viewpoints," Johnson said. "You get the coach at Gonzaga (Mark Few) who I'm sure could have gone away for lots of money, but he really enjoyed the Gonzaga community and wanted to see that develop. And he did develop a relatively small school into a phenomenal team and he did that by building a program over many years."
After a three-year stint as an NBA head coach in the early 2000s, compiling a 108-138 overall record with the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings, Musselman turned his coaching career around in the NBA D-League.
He led the Sacramento Kings-affiliated Reno Bighorns to a conference-best 34-16 regular-season record in 2010-11; the following season, he helmed the Los Angeles D-Fenders, the Lakers affiliate, to a league-best 38-12.
Musselman got his start in college basketball with two seasons at Arizona State, then moved to LSU for one season before accepting the top job at Nevada. His near-overnight success, transforming a 9-22 Wolf Pack into CBI champions the following season, have made him one of the top targets of high-profile programs throughout his career.
