There is a lot of positivity surrounding Razorback head coach Eric Musselman and Arkansas basketball with a 9-1 start to the season, but one of the few critiques of Musselman is his philosophy on timeouts.

Musselman has only called three timeouts this season through 10 games. Additionally, he has only used a timeout in two separate games.

“I think so,” Musselman said on Saturday. “One of the things, having coached in the NBA, you always try to pick peoples’ brains and one of the coaches I’ve admired and coached against is Phil Jackson. Coach Jackson coached in the minor leagues for a long time and worked his way up to coaching in the NBA. I had that conversation and asked, ‘Why not call timeouts?’ Because two of my good friends or two of the guys that I really respect as coaches, Jeff Van Gundy and Tom Thibodeau, it seems like they have a thousand timeouts every game, like every two seconds they were calling timeouts. So everybody’s kind of got their own philosophy. I watched Nebraska play Indiana last night, Coach Hoiberg did not call a timeout, Nebraska comes down in the flow of the game, hits a three, sends it to overtime. Different situations are different and teams are different. The thing that’s a little bit different, too, in college than the NBA is if you call a timeout with 20 seconds to go, you don’t know if the team’s going to come out in zone or man. In the NBA, I can pretty much tell you 99.9 percent of the time, they’re coming out in man and I can tell you how they’re playing pick-and-rolls. It’s just different in college. Sometimes the players need to feel some freedom and they need to feel that you trust them and you don’t try to over-control things. I think my team right now knows that I trust their judgment, even though sometimes we might disagree on some things. But there is a level of trust for sure.”

In Arkansas’ latest game against Tulsa, Musselman called a rare timeout with 11:56 left in the second period after the Golden Hurricane cut the Razorbacks’ lead to nine points, 68-59. The Hogs had led by as many as 19 points prior to that point.

After the timeout, Musselman’s team responded. The Razorbacks extended their lead back out to 20 points within four minutes and went onto win the game, 98-79.

"Coach Muss, if he calls a timeout it's probably because we've been doing something really, really wrong because he does not like to call timeouts," Razorback guard Isaiah Joe said. "He likes to be able to know he's going to have them at the end of the game and things of that sort. We're in such great shape, having the media timeouts and the other team calling timeouts, that's really all we need, so that's what we're always working on, our conditioning. Things like this long week of practice, you know, we still continue to work on our conditioning so we'll be ready for things like that because we know he doesn't like to call timeouts."