Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
If I understand the broader Texas Longhorns community in the world of men’s basketball, individual games are the only things that matter. Most of these individual games are the ones played in March at neutral sites not named Kansas City, but every now and then, you get a regular season matchup that will wholly define, at least for a brief period, what a bulk of the fanbase thinks of the program.
Today is such a blessing.
Texas goes to Knoxville tonight, playing the Tennessee Volunteers in the Big 12/SEC Challenge. For Tennessee fans—who have a creepy obsession with Texas because of also being orange and also referring to themselves as UT—it’s a chance to ratchet up the hype enough to temporarily drown their raging inferiority complex. For Texas fans, it’s an up-close look at their old man, Rick Barnes. Tennessee is favored to win, so we’re going to get ahead of this and ask the titular question.
You’re welcome if we jinx anything.
The case that Texas should have kept Rick Barnes is that Tennessee is better than Texas right now and it should be easier to be good at Texas than it is at Tennessee, thanks mostly to location and resources.
The case that Texas was right to fire Rick Barnes is that over his last four years, Rick Barnes never had one of the twenty best teams in the country, and both coaches Texas has hired since Barnes are, isolated to coaching ability, in similar or higher positions on the college basketball coaching perceptional ladder.
What will make this such a great debate, if it comes to pass in the discourse, is that it’s very arbitrary. Would you rather have Rick Barnes or Chris Beard–turned–Rodney Terry? Probably Barnes, but it’s hard to say. Would you rather have had Rick Barnes or Shaka Smart over the Shaka Smart years? For most fans, the answer is probably Barnes, but again: It’s underwhelming. Would you rather have Barnes or whoever Texas hires this offseason? Probably the new hire, but there’s a decent chance whoever it is changes that by 2026.
Adding a layer of silliness here is that Tennessee fans are embarking on their own exploration of whether Rick Barnes is a good idea. Tennessee’s good right now, but their offense is inconsistent and Rick Barnes’s whole life in the month of March points to the guy either being a bad single-game coach or tremendously unlucky. The luck thing’s irrelevant, but if it’s bad single-game coaching, that aspect paired with an inconsistent offense is a bad recipe for keeping Tennesseans satisfied. Barnes isn’t going to get fired this offseason (you could even see him getting poached, in a few theoreticals), but until he plays into April, he’s never more than two years away.
And so it is that Texas and Tennessee go to battle, each doomed in their own special way. We can’t wait for reactions.
