Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Texas is the best team in the Big 12. That, or the second best. The stratifying finally happened yesterday, the wheat has been sorted from the chaff, TCU is hurt and Baylor’s hole was too big and Iowa State and Kansas State are no more. We are living in a world with two conference superpowers, and those powers are Texas and Kansas.
This isn’t doom for the Shaka Smart loyalists among us. For one thing, it’s happened before. Back when the Big 12 was still its original whole, that Jordan Hamilton UT team was second in the league to Kansas. They didn’t play into April. They didn’t transform Texas into a national power. They lost on the first weekend of that certain tournament, and they lost to an underdog in Arizona in the month that came to be known as Kemba Walker’s, and they spent the whole next season unranked after sending Hamilton and Cory Joseph and Tristan Thompson to the NBA Draft. It was a very Rick Barnes season, the last of the good years with that man. It did not—as we now see—mean Texas was a successful men’s basketball program.
For another, though, Texas reaching this position again in such messy fashion almost speaks worse of the program than if they’d never reached it again at all. It’s not some brilliant design working to perfection. It’s a disaster and it’s a bunch of outgoing mercenary talent and it’s Brock Cunningham in his fifth year becoming a bizarrely effective offensive weapon. It might even pin the program down, because while Rodney Terry has his strengths, leading a nationally contending program is more of him than can be reasonably asked. Chris Del Conte has guts and isn’t an idiot—two things that make him the best athletic director in the country—and he’ll do everything in his power to not make Terry the head coach. But if this team does well enough, what choice is he going to have?
It’s a scary thing, Texas being good at basketball. It’s a weird thing, Barnes and Smart and Terry coaching a combined three of the best ten or twelve teams in the country while Chris Beard is out of a job. But this doesn’t mean we’re going to watch Texas become a basketball school or anything of that sort. This is still Texas. Hook ‘em away, because even the best trajectory right now aims straight for the void.
