Eric Musselman breaks down game-winning shot by Tramon Mark

Arkansas won a thrilling contest against Texas A&M on Tuesday night when Tramon Mark spun around and made a jumper from close to 10 feet, sealing the win with about one second remaining.

The terrific shot, which sealed a 78-77 win, came after Arkansas nearly blew what had been a 20-point lead at one point in the game. But the winning shot? It was dialed up perfectly.

“We spaced the floor out. Luckily we were able to get organized, because we were out of timeouts,” coach Eric Musselman said. “And we were able to set up a little bit of a press break even though they kind of matched up straight man, there was no press as there had been, so to speak. Then I thought that we got the ball in the hands of who we needed to tonight, because T-Mark was playing with such great confidence.”

Decided on how they wanted things to play out, Arkansas set about executing in crunch time. The ball was in-bounded and quickly moved up the floor.

“And then we just spaced out,” Musselman explained. “We had (Jeremiah) Davenport in one corner. We had El Ellis in the other corner. We had (Trevon Brazile) trailing as the in-bounder and then we had (Keyon) Menifield on the 45-degree angle on the left side. Just said there was no way we were taking a three. We’ve got to go to the cup or at least get inside of that 12-, 14-foot range really.”

Tramon Mark got the ball at the top of the key and drove to his left, muscling up a South Carolina defender as he took flight for the jumper.

He released and it swished right through. Texas A&M tried to quickly inbound the ball, but the Aggies weren’t ready and blew any chance at a last-second heave.

A huge win for Arkansas.

And Musselman defended the look the Razorbacks worked to get after the game.

“I know that all the analytics people talk about midrange being a bad shot,” Musselman said. “It’s been a really good shot for us at Arkansas. Jimmy Whitt, Ricky Council, T-Mark, like it’s a great shot for him, not a good shot. I mean he’s a lethal, pull-up jump shooter, 12 to 17 foot.”

Given the fact that Tramon Mark was already plenty hot in the game, too, and the decision to go to him at the end seems more like a no-brainer than a stroke of genius. Either way it worked.

“Look, he had 35 points on 15 field goals attempted,” Musselman said. “Our guys did a great job of finding him, even his two threes. They were off spot-up assists. We did a pretty good job on the glass. Not great, but decent enough to win the game.”

For Arkansas, securing a win after a tough start to conference play was a huge deal.

“Look, we led for 38 minutes,” Musselman said. “That’s a drastic improvement from where we’ve been our first three games, to lead for basically the entire game. Give Texas A&M a ton of credit. They came back, had a great second half. They’ve had a lot of come-from-behind wins. It was an incredible shot by a great, great player in Wade Taylor. They’re super well-coached and they’ve been a hard matchup for us since I’ve been here.”