‘It’s our best players’: Major injuries wreak havoc on Razorbacks
Pass the bubble wrap to the coaches in the three major sports at the University of Arkansas.
It’s understandable if Dave Van Horn, Eric Musselman and Sam Pittman held their breath on every play during the 2022-23 school year, fearful of what sprain, strain, break or tear could be around the bend.
Old timers around Razorback athletics cannot recall a year like the athletic department is going through when it comes to injuries big and small that have impacted Arkansas football, basketball and baseball.
“It’s not just our regular players,” said a person associated with UA athletics. “It’s our best players.”
Injuries impact every major college athletic program, sometimes to key players, on a year-to-year basis.
To put it in a modern context, bad injuries are as inevitable as conference realignment, a revolving NCAA transfer portal door or weird happenings on the NIL trail.
But has a program ever gone through as many injuries — many of them of the season-ending variety — to standout players in the big three sports as the Arkansas Razorbacks this school year of 2022-23?
Van Horn, whose team’s ailments have been spread out from preseason through this week, was asked if he could recall a season with more injury problems.
“To answer your question, I really don’t,” Van Horn said. “I see all those guys out there in the M*A*S*H unit working out while we’re taking batting practice. They’re staying in shape in the outfield, and I’m just saying ‘Please get back. We need to get you guys back.'”
Van Horn then rattled off the next three weekend opponents for the Razorbacks — at Mississippi State, home vs. South Carolina, and at Vanderbilt — because there are milestones associated with comebacks for key players.
“Honestly, I normally don’t know off the top of my head who we’re playing three weeks down the road,” he said. “Maybe the next weekend, the two previous. But with all the injuries, I’ve kind of glanced at it, thinking ‘We can get these guys back, maybe for this series or for the [SEC] tournament or whatever.’ But we’ve put ourselves in position to not panic so to speak down the stretch.”
Each of the “Big 3” sports at Arkansas has lost at least one athlete for the season who would arguably be among its top few players and a potential early-round draft pick in his sport. In addition to the high-profile losses, each of those sports has lost numerous other starters and big-time contributors for all or parts of the season.
In football, second-year team captain and defensive standout Jalen Catalon suffered a shoulder injury halfway through the season opener that put him out for the year. And that was just the tip of the injury iceberg for Pittman’s club.
In basketball, McDonald’s All-American guard Nick Smith and swingman Trevon Brazile missed large chunks of the season with knee problems for Musselman. Brazile’s injury on Dec. 6, which led to knee ligament replacement surgery, cost him the final 27 games.
Pitcher Jaxon Wiggins, a projected weekend starter, required season-ending Tommy John surgery on Feb. 22. But the ailments did not stop there for Van Horn’s club. Pitcher Koty Frank suffered a torn lat muscle on March 5 and was lost for the year.
Additionally, pitcher Brady Tygart and starting outfielders Jared Wegner and Tavian Josenberger have missed or will miss substantial time dealing with various bone, ligament or muscle problems.
The injuries have been virtually non-stop throughout the calendar year.
Defensive tackle Taurean Carter suffered a season-ending torn knee ligament in the spring showcase last April. And on May 1, budding star cornerback Quincey McAdoo was involved in a car wreck that has left his future prospects in limbo.
All the while, the baseball injuries have continued to mount, including a torn ulnar collateral ligament for pitcher Dylan Carter that ended his season.
Despite the injury setbacks, none of those programs fell into a pit of gloom-and-doom despair.
No coach wants to come across as whining about injury woes, and Pittman, Musselman and Van Horn have not done that, by and large.
But facts are facts. Injuries test team depth and impact performance.
“It’s hard when you don’t have your leadoff man or your three-hole hitter,” Van Horn said last week. “We’ve done pretty well without our three-hole hitter [Wegner] for a while, but then you lose your leadoff guy [Josenberger] who is an energy guy and a defender. It puts a kink into it.”
The football team dropped back two games from the 9-4 surge of 2021, and that was largely due to four losses by three or fewer points.
The basketball team ran up a 22-14 record and reached the Sweet 16 before falling to eventual national champion Connecticut. Musselman’s Razorbacks tied Alabama and Tennessee as the longest-surviving SEC team in the NCAA Tournament, giving Arkansas that distinction for the third consecutive year.
The baseball club’s postseason fortunes are still to be told, but the Hogs have been hanging in there. They led the SEC West until being swept at Georgia two weekends ago and are still in second place despite having a more sustained run of injury woes than the others.
Missouri State Coach Keith Guttin had some uplifting remarks for Van Horn and hitting coach Nate Thompson, who had formerly been on Guttin’s staff, after his team beat the Hogs 8-4 last Tuesday.
“You want the guys that you normally play to be healthy and when they’re not, it makes a difference on any team,” Guttin said. “It made a difference with us earlier with our pitching staff. I think they’ve got a lot of position player injuries and that’s going to make a difference with any team. I told Nate, I told Dave after the game, ‘You’ll be there at the end when you get your guys back,’ and they will.”
Musselman not only had to replenish minutes to make up for the losses of Brazile and Smith, he had to tinker with game plans almost throughout the season because those two were key offensive cogs.
“One of college basketball’s most talented players, Trevon Brazile, is out with a knee injury,” Musselman said before the Razorbacks played UConn in Las Vegas. “I truly think he was one of the most versatile players in all of college basketball. We kind of built our team around him and then obviously with Nick Smith being in and out of the lineup, this team has dealt with a lot.”
Musselman was asked how he had to implement new plans throughout the season.
“We had to go back to our minor league days where our rosters were constantly changing,” Musselman said. “We would have guys called up to the NBA and have to coach a new roster with new players on short notice.
“Finding ways for them to connect and play for one another quickly was key to having immediate success on the floor.”
In football, all four of the team captains were dinged up at points in 2022.
Center Ricky Stromberg injured an elbow in the preseason, but played on.
Catalon’s season-ending injury was his second in a row, following shoulder surgery midway through the 2022 slate.
Additionally, quarterback KJ Jefferson and linebacker Bumper Pool missed two full games with injuries and played at less than 100% in several others. Jefferson was injured for parts of four of the team’s six losses and twice did not play. Cornerback LaDarrius Bishop needed knee surgery after two games. Midway through the season, a swath of defensive backs were dinged up, further disturbing the secondary depth.
Pittman said a priority in spring was having a backup quarterback in place who could keep the offense producing if something happened to Jefferson as it did last year. To that end, transfer Jacolby Criswell and fifth-year senior Cade Fortin reached the end of spring in a deadlock for the backup job.
Criswell, of Morrilton, gained momentum and confidence in the schemes throughout spring.
“I think he’s just going to get better and better,” Pittman said. “So yes, I think part of the question would be can we beat an SEC team with him at quarterback, and the answer would be absolutely, in my opinion. So he was very, very valuable to us to bring in.”
Injuries are a part of the game, as every player and coach knows. But the Razorbacks would prefer to never have another run on them as they have in 2022-23.
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