We were not the only people to warn you about Rodney Terry. There were plenty of voices in the college basketball blogosphere last spring familiar with the track record. Still, you can be forgiven for being surprised. Rodney Terry was the ultimate hire for doe-eyed media folks who flutter around the CBS orbit in March. He was a nice man. He kept a good roster playing well amidst a shit-storm. He had some sort of role in the assembly of that roster. But Rodney Terry had never been an effective full-time head coach before, and Texas could have afforded better options. In the end, either Texas boosters liked Terry because they were being doe-eyed themselves or Chris Del Conte wanted a bridge coach, one of those pre-fired guys who holds the job for a year or two before a dream candidate opens up.
The strongest theory here, in our opinion, is that the boosters saw a team winning and said, “Hell no will we pay multiple million more for Scott Drew or Kelvin Sampson or Jerome Tang. Terry’s winning ballgames. The job’s his,” and left Del Conte choosing to fight other battles. That’s just our guess, but we think Del Conte’s too smart to expect anything other than what this season has been so far, which has been Texas’s biggest underperformance of talent (comparing present kenpom rating to preseason) since 2013, when Rick Barnes made the CBI. Texas is bad. We love that around here—we’re an NIT blog located in Austin, this is gold for us—but Texas is bad.
Where things really got bad for Texas was in the handshake line. I would guess you’ve seen it by now, because you’re reading this, but if you haven’t, Rodney Terry lost his temper and started cussing at UCF players after seeing many of them flash the Horns Down after Terry’s team choked away a 15-point second half lead. That’s when it got embarrassing. For Terry, for the players, and for the school.
A thing about Texas basketball is that people don’t really care about it. It gets jokes here and there, and some Texas Tech diehards get worked up about the rivalry, but Texas is a football school in the purest form. The basketball program is an afterthought, both in Austin and in the national college basketball universe. It’s come close at times to being different, but the moment always passes. When Texas loses a home game to the Big 12’s poorest program, it doesn’t register on a lot of people’s seismographs.
However.
When Rodney Terry throws the biggest Horns Down-provoked fit in recent memory, then doubles down on his outburst in the press conference?
That’s the thing that will get people laughing at the Longhorns.
Once upon a time, there was a big blowup in the professional sports world regarding players kneeling for the national anthem, something described by the first to do it as being intended as a respectful protest. Back when that whole thing was a more current topic (but still rather old), a friend tried to explain to me why kneeling in church is respectful but kneeling during the national anthem is not. There wasn’t much of an explanation. “It’s just not respectful,” they kept saying, and I chalked it up to context mattering for that person. It feels similar when someone tries to explain the problem with Horns Down. “It’s just not respectful.” But why? At least with the kneeling, the real explanation for my friend’s anger was obvious.
The best explanation anyone triggered by Horns Down ever offers for being triggered by Horns Down is that the opponent wishes they were Texas. The logic goes that everyone is trying to beat Texas, and that the Horns Downers wouldn’t be doing silly hand signals if they’d expected to win. This is what Terry said in his ill-fated press conference after the game, where he didn’t apologize for cussing at a bunch of adolescents who’d just beaten him and instead called them classless, criticizing them for showing up poor little Texas. There are a lot of flaws with this argument. For one thing, UCF used to do this to South Florida back in the AAC, and variations exist all around the college sports world. For another, the most frequent Horns Downers are Oklahoma football players, and I don’t think any recent Oklahoma football player hasn’t expected to beat Texas. The biggest problem with the explanation, though, is that it doesn’t explain the anger at all. “When you do those kinds of things, it looks very classless and like you were just hoping to win,” Terry said. Do…do you think teams should expect to beat you?
The best way Texas people can react to Horns Down is to laugh at it. Turn up their noses at it. Say, “Ahh, yes, look at those peasants celebrating their one win. Well, congratulations to them on their Super Bowl. Who do we play next?” This conveys confidence. The second-best way Texas people can react is to blow up, but to blow up at Texas. “Them? UCF?? You let *them* beat us? You let them do Horns Down??” This releases the frustration but in an accountable, not–embarrassing way. The worst way Texas people can react is to react like Rodney Terry reacted. Getting mad at someone for how they celebrate beating you is a loser move.
If I’m remembering correctly, the last time we got a serious Horns Down controversy was when Will Grier did it after West Virginia won in 2018 in Austin, the low point in a bad season that turned into the most optimistic moment of the Tom Herman era, the win over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. After the game, Herman complained that it should have been an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, and Sam Ehlinger tweeted something out about remembering those who disrespect the University of Texas and vowing vengeance upon them. Those responses? They were weird, but they were fair. Herman was looking for a technicality to save a win and Ehlinger was doing his wonderful Sam Ehlinger thing of treating Texas like his god (I am not being sarcastic—we loved Sam Ehlinger around here, mostly because his obsession with Texas went so far beyond any rational bounds). I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a meltdown like Rodney Terry’s meltdown. Did he think defending Texas’s honor would rally the boosters to his cause?
The nice thing about this, for everybody, is that we’ve got our answer on how nice we need to be to Rodney Terry. For a while, he seemed like a good guy. That was his reputation, and there was no reason to think otherwise, so we went with it. It was effective marketing. It made it awkward when talking about what a bad hire he seemed to be, so we treaded carefully around that discourse. Now? I mean, he’s probably not a terrible person or anything. But generally, society doesn’t look kindly these days on grown men who cuss out 19-year-olds unprovoked.
It’s gross to speculate about firing coaches. It’s easy to do, but it’s something we should be more careful about when we do it. There are assistants to consider, for one thing, and those guys and their families are not living as large as Rodney Terry or Tom Herman. It’s hard not to point out, though, that Rodney Terry is on track to be a one-and-done full-time head coach. Texas is narrowly favored tomorrow. They won’t be again this month. And if there’s a place things tend to spiral when they go badly, it’s the University of Texas. Buckle up.
What’s Going On Here
Welcome back to longtime Nuts readers, but for those of you who are new, ‘BFN’ stands for Bevo’s Fake Nuts, an allusion to the occasional suggestion from the most Texas among the booster crowd to put neuticles on Texas’s mascot. BFN used to be a short column about Texas sports. It’s now taking on more of a newsletter format. We’ll be publishing it mostly on Mondays and Fridays, and usually once a week. We’ll have one or two main topics, some newsier stuff, and a roundup of UT athletics. We mean this sincerely (in most cases): Hook ‘em.
Quick(er) Hitters
You know who hasn’t blown up about Horns Down yet? Texas’s most notable program-builder. Steve Sarkisian picked up four big transfers this week, three of which came from Alabama in the form of Amari Niblack (TE), Kendrick Blackshire (LB), and the biggest name: Isaiah Bond, out at wide receiver. Silas Bolden also joined the receiving corps, transferring in from Oregon State. Texas was already a team returning a lot of talent. The roster keeps getting better.
The Roundup
Baylor’s at the Moody Center tomorrow for an early tip. It would be a nice win, and that’s what makes it nearly a must-win for these Longhorns. We haven’t seen this particular roster rally in the face of this specific type of adversity. We haven’t seen Texas lose back-to-back should–wins in this Beard/Terry era. After tomorrow, the schedule offers four straight should–loses. There isn’t going to be another good chance to rally until Iowa State and West Virginia come to town in a few weeks. Texas needs to nip this in the bud tomorrow and get Oklahoma playing tighter come Tuesday. Otherwise, they might fall right through our NIT Bracketology and out the other side.
That Tuesday game is in Norman, and Oklahoma isn’t as good as Baylor, but it’s close. This is Porter Moser’s best team so far, and Moser’s teams have rarely been ones to get upset. The issue for Moser has more often been that his teams aren’t good enough, not that they blow good situations. This team appears to be good enough. At least to win on Tuesday.
The women’s basketball team smoked Kansas their last time out, climbing to 4–2 in Big 12 play, tied for fourth in the conference. They’ve got Oklahoma State in Stillwater tomorrow and then Oklahoma back home on Wednesday. Both should be winnable, even with both opponents in the top half of the league standings right now.
The men’s tennis team lost yesterday to top-ranked Virginia, 4–3. With a win, they would have been in contention for the top ranking themselves. They’re now off until next Saturday. The women’s team is at UCLA today and at USC on Sunday. Going by rankings, they’re favored to win both, but I have no idea how home-court advantage shakes out in college tennis. I also don’t know when and if the rankings are worthwhile at all. Pay attention long enough to college basketball, and you will start habitually rejecting rankings.
Yusuf Bizimana was named the Male National Athlete of the Week after a strong 1,000-meter run in the track and field program’s indoor season opener. He set a new NCAA indoor record. The teams are in Albuquerque this weekend for the Dr. MLK Jr. Invitational, hosted by New Mexico. The first rankings of the year will come out on Monday.
The swimming and diving teams are off this weekend.
