Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
We did it, everybody. It’s not exactly what we planned, but Texas missed the Final Four and Texas is reportedly, per Chip Brown, offering Rodney Terry the fulltime job.
The Nuts would like to clear up two things:
We like Rodney Terry, for the most part.
We think Rodney Terry is a solid coach.
Terry, to the Nuts, is a poor man’s Jerome Tang. He’s got a decent pedigree and one great year. What Tang lacks in head coaching experience, Terry lacks in head coaching success. He wasn’t bad at Fresno State or UTEP, but he wasn’t all that good, and while parrots are criticizing the Fresno job, it’s a Division I gig in California. Terry’s best finish in the Mountain West was second, and that was a year when the league graded out worse than the A-10. His next-best finish was fourth, and again: Worse than the A-10. At UTEP, Terry got the Miners to .500 in conference play. Was he making progress? Sure. But it was slow.
This isn’t to equate Fresno State and UTEP with Texas. Maybe Terry thrives with bigger resources. Many who fawned over Chris Beard’s recruiting are now crediting Terry for it, which could be accurate, but leaves the important part unsaid: Terry has run Division I men’s basketball programs in full for ten seasons. He’s only finished at or above NIT at-large territory one time, and it was a nailbiter. Does this year count? Of course. But he hasn’t coached a full season yet, let alone run the full program. Texas was speculated as capable of poaching Scott Drew. Texas could have had Tang or Eric Musselman. Texas could have probably hired Kelvin Sampson. Texas is reportedly keeping Rodney Terry.
Is the continuity worth it? There’s a benefit, to be sure. The roster turnover will be sizable, but it might be less than half the rotation, if Dylan Disu stays out of the draft and Arterio Morris stays out of jail. With good incoming freshmen, a transfer or two would make another competitive Big 12 roster. But as Beard showed, you don’t need continuity at Texas. You maybe don’t even want it, given the recent tradition in both men’s basketball and football where five-stars underperform.
What happened, then? What happened between January, when the consensus was that Terry needed to make a Final Four run to keep his job, and now? Was the 2-seed and surviving the first weekend simply enough?
The idea behind that Final Four speculation was never that it was a specific target which would prove Terry capable. The idea was that it would generate enough booster support to force Chris Del Conte’s hand. “Final Four” is easy to say, but without the context, it was misleading. Terry likely never had a specific wins target. He just needed to generate enough goodwill among Texas powerbrokers to tie Del Conte’s hands.
Well, consider those hands tied. The Rodney Terry era officially begins in Austin.
