Alright, this is ridiculous:
Barnes was hired by Texas in April 1998, and the basketball program immediately displayed his impact. Despite playing with just seven scholarship players for the majority of the 1998–99 season and opening the season with a 3–8 record, the Longhorns won 16 of their final 21 games, winning the regular season Big 12 conference championship by a two-game margin, and finishing the year at 19–13 and qualifying for the NCAA Tournament.
Barnes’ success at Texas, a traditional football powerhouse, sparked interest in college basketball at the university and throughout the state. At Texas, Barnes won a school-record 402 games and transformed the school into one of the top college basketball programs in the nation. He guided the Longhorns to 16 NCAA tournament appearances. They reached the Final Four in 2003, their first in over 50 years, and advanced to the Elite Eight in 2006 and 2008. He also led Texas to their first #1 ranking in 2010, and led the Longhorns to the first 30-win seasons in school history. He coached two national players of the year: T. J. Ford (2003) and Kevin Durant (2007). He also won four Big 12 Coach of the Year awards (1999, 2003, 2008, 2014) during his time in Austin, establishing himself as a nationally regarded coach. He was fired in 2015 after Texas failed to advance to the Sweet 16 for the seventh straight season.
That’s the entirety of the Texas portion of Rick Barnes’s Wikipedia page, and it contains some doozies. Texas, who’d played into the second weekend of March in 1997 and made that tournament in eight of Tom Penders’s ten years, wasn’t interested in basketball? As a state?! Barnes left with Texas as one of the best programs in the nation?!
It’s obscene enough that I’ve got half a mind to edit it.
We went on the page because we were trying to remember if Barnes got fired or if he resigned. Fired is the answer, we see. Fired for “having sparked interest in college basketball at the university and throughout the state.” Fired for “transform(ing) the school into one of the top college basketball programs in the nation.”
Our best theory as to what happened here is that some Texas fan loved Barnes and was mad he got fired, but a much more fun theory is that Barnes had somebody do this, and the most fun one we can come up with is that when Texas boosters and administrators were arguing amongst themselves about whether or not to fire Barnes, someone on Barnes’s side thought it’d be strategic to embellish on the Wikipedia page, in case someone on the fence happened to go on there for a refresher course, lying awake at night with their phone next to their bed. This could go a lot of directions—maybe the person on the fence was swayed against Barnes, seeing the Wikipedia entry as ridiculous—but we’ll leave it at these theories, because we have to go now. We have a Shaka Smart Wikipedia page to juice.
