Arkansas basketball and football fans are fully aware of significant the hires of Eric Musselman and Sam Pittman have been to their favorite teams.
But now, after the Razorbacks’ best football season in more than a decade and the basketball team’s 13-out-of-14 stretch, the world is picking up on it.
Blake Toppmeyer, USA TODAY’s national football columnist, spoke with Arkansas athletic director Hunter Yurachek about the growth in the program over the course of the last two years.
Arkansas had become, in football, anyway, a laughingstock. The two worst seasons in Razorbacks history came during the two seasons in which Chad Morris was coach. Yurachek had made what appeared to be a solid hire when he poached Musselman from Nevada for Mike Anderson, even as hard as that move might have been. But football is the money-maker in the SEC. He needed another splash.
“Many coaches that I talked to said, ‘You can’t win at the University of Arkansas. I don’t believe I can be successful at the University of Arkansas. That’s an uphill battle being in the SEC West,'” Yurachek said in the article. “Sam Pittman never said any of those things to me. He told me how you could win at the University of Arkansas.”
Pittman was considered a longshot by the rest of the college football world. A man pushing 60 who had never been much more than an offensive line coach would be leading an SEC program? Surely that couldn’t work.
They thought. They thought wrong.
Check out more of Toppmeyer’s discussion with Yurachek and the state of Razorbacks athletics.