Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
I have nothing against the University of Texas.
Except for how a large section of their fanbase treated Shaka Smart and that their football tailgating setup is sneakily terrible but has a good reputation somehow (it’s always the reputation piece for me).
Mostly the Shaka Smart thing, though.
I’m not usually a Texas hater. For the most part. I’m usually someone who wants Texas to be entertaining. Does that mean I want them to be good? Not necessarily. I want them to be good enough for it to be funny when funny things happen. The monkey-bite season with all the comeback losses was perfect for this. Outside of football and men’s basketball, I’ll always cheer for Texas, so long as they aren’t playing another school I care about and their team isn’t the douchier one on the field. In football? Give me comedy. In men’s basketball? Give me vengeance for the way the losers among them treated my guy.
Where does that leave the Nuts, right now, hours away from Texas’s “Sweet Sixteen” game against Xavier?
The Nuts are confused.
There are two ways to approach this: There’s the short-term way and there’s the long-term way. In either scenario, Texas must not win this tournament. That is a non-starter. Somebody must stop Texas, and we have four more chances, so somebody probably will, but I don’t like that the number is down to four.
In the short-term approach, the conventional approach, we the haters would want Texas to lose as quickly as possible in as funny a manner as possible. No-show against Xavier. Blowout against Houston. Massive collapse against Miami. All these would be good options. Except…
Except if Texas loses this weekend, and if Texas loses in any way other than giving Houston a hell of a game Sunday, Rodney Terry will completely exit the minds of the national media. Many are carrying his flag right now, but there’s only so much attention to go around. No one pays that attention to the teams that aren’t playing. Locals? They’ll soften when they see who Chris Del Conte can pull, and it will be surprising if Chris Del Conte can’t pull Kelvin Sampson or Jerome Tang or Eric Musselman, and that’s if he can’t land Scott Drew.
The thing about Rodney Terry’s season is that he has done his job the very best anyone could possibly do his job. You cannot ask for better performance than what Terry has done. But Rodney Terry’s job this year has not been what Rodney Terry’s job will be. Only one time will Terry be asked to coach an already-assembled super roster for three months after that super roster’s assembler is fired for allegedly choking, biting, and hitting his fiancée and then giving the impression of not understanding the severity of the allegations. This has been a specific situation. Terry will need to run an entire program, and Terry will need to recruit, ideally in the transfer portal, which doesn’t only come down to setting the boosters loose. He’ll also need to identify the right guys. Timmy Allen was a top ten transfer target, but there were nine others. He was the right fit, among the ten, for Texas. With the persuasion point, too: Chris Beard was a more proven name than Rodney Terry, no matter what Terry does these next two weeks. For players wanting to do big things, Terry will not have the same draw that Beard had, or that Sampson or Drew or Musselman or even Tang would have.
Chris Del Conte is a smart man, understanding Texas’s position as only a person who athletic directed at Rice and TCU for eleven years can. This is part of why Texas’s athletic department as a whole is the strongest it’s ever been. Chris Del Conte knows who he can get, and if he doesn’t bring back Terry, it will be because he knows he can get someone better or because his hands are tied.
Which is why we want Chris Del Conte’s hands tied.
The ideal here is to thread the needle, to get that close loss to Houston that leaves Texas without a Final Four since 2003 but still amps the pressure enough to get Terry the full-time job. If that doesn’t happen, though, I think that we the haters want Texas to make the Final Four. Ideally, this wouldn’t be by beating Houston—if Texas beats a healthy Houston, Texas is a lot better than we thought—but if it comes to that, it comes to that. As long as Texas doesn’t win this tournament, scenarios in which the athletic department is pigeonholed into giving Terry the job are the best for us, the haters. Because Rodney Terry wasn’t all that good at Fresno State. Because Rodney Terry was fine at UTEP, but he didn’t break through. Because Rodney Terry is a great in-season coach and will probably do fine at Texas if given the job long-term, but that’s all he will do: He’ll do fine. Texas didn’t magically stumble upon some 54-year-old diamond nestled in the second seat on their bench. They found a good coach capable of coaching good players. Doing what Texas wants its men’s basketball to do requires a whole lot more than that.
So tonight? Hook ‘em. Not because we want Texas to win. But because we want the funniest thing possible to happen to Texas. Because two straight seasons disappointedly on the bubble after this one would be a grand, grand time.
