Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
It’s a big weekend in Austin. The town is buzzing. Coming to the Frank Erwin Center tomorrow night are the…
Ok, so it’s not that big of a weekend. Things are quiet. And while there might be a decent crowd for it, if you asked the average person on the street who they thought would win the game tomorrow, they would ask you what game, and that includes streets on campus.
But while it’s not that big a weekend in Austin, it’s a huge weekend for Chris Beard. Because pacing in front of the opposite bench is a man Beard would do well to emulate.
Yes, Rick Barnes is back at UT this weekend, coaching the Volunteers (but not volunteer coaching, to be clear—I believe Barnes is paid more than any other public employee in the state of Tennessee) as they play the Longhorns, and man. If Beard could just match Barnes’s performance…I mean, look at the guy. Tennessee’s been a top-five seed each of the last three postseasons in the tournament Texas evidently views as the one to make. Tennessee made the “Sweet Sixteen” of that tournament just three years ago. And going back to Barnes’s time at Texas, well, I’ve been told a “Final Four” and two “Elite Eight” trips are pretty darn good, at least on the Texas measuring stick.
It’s a shame Texas couldn’t hold on to this stud of a coach. I guess they just didn’t have the pocketbooks for it, or maybe he felt he couldn’t win enough in Austin? Whatever happened, it’s gotta hurt the fans to see him prowling the other sideline, quite possibly beating his old team on his old home floor.
Still, we’d encourage the Longhorns to be positive, and we’d especially encourage this to Chris Beard. After all, what Barnes shows Beard is that it really is possible to have moderate success at the University of Texas at Austin, provided of course that you’re coaching there prior to 2010 and your performance doesn’t become solely measured off of isolated single games years apart.
We’d be remiss not to mention that it is possible the Horns will win this. After all, Texas just soundly beat a bubble team on the road for what was arguably the program’s most impressive victory in Beard’s time at the helm. Winning this one would be massive, partially because it would leave a good post-Barnes taste in the mouth and partially because it would constitute a win over a team that’s not going to miss that tournament. (Unless, well, have you seen Tennessee play? Because I’m not convinced they’re a lock just yet.) We could well look back in four years at this as the defining win of the Chris Beard era.
Could the stakes be higher? I suppose so. But they also might not be. They might never be this high again. This could be the peak for Texas basketball.
Best of luck, friends.
