I was having a beer with a guy in December, and he commented that a University of Texas booster he’d talked to had told him that it’s hard to win at Texas because Austin’s so fun. He said it’s hard to keep players focused.
Do I buy that? No. Plenty of collegetowns are fun. That’s the point of college.
But for what it’s worth, Lubbock is not Austin, and Chris Beard’s going to have to adjust if he wants to have similar success to what he had up in the panhandle (nearly making two NIT’s, putting together a couple good runs in that other tournament). He’s going to have to deal with more “proper” donors. He’s going to have to deal with less reasonable expectations. He’s going to have to deal with not being able to be the biggest thing in town just by winning a few games at the right time.
And he’s going to have to rebuild.
Texas has some holes in next year’s lineup, and that’s without seeing what will happen with recruits (Tamar Bates asked for a release from his letter of intent prior to the Beard hire) or seeing what will happen with guys who can potentially transfer out of Texas (Andrew Jones is a grad transfer possibility, Courtney Ramey could leave, even Kamaka Hepa would be a tough loss given how low the numbers are getting). Can Beard fill those holes? Maybe, but there’s speculation that grad transfers are going to be harder to get admitted than they were up at Texas Tech, which could make filling them a multi-year project.
Yes, Beard’s going to have better resources in Austin than he did in Lubbock, especially when the new arena’s done. Yes, Beard’s going to have an easier time recruiting than he did in Lubbock (and he recruited rather well in Lubbock). But this isn’t a no-brainer, because Beard still has to get the program back to where Shaka Smart left it talent-wise, which should take at least two years, and he then will need to find his way through a presumably-still-loaded Big 12, and that’s without wondering whether the culture Beard built at Tech—the alligator hunting method of pulling opponents down into the mud and drowning them—will play in Austin. Texas Tech’s got blue collar vibes. Texas does not.
It’s a good hire by Texas.
It’s hard to think of a better hire for Texas.
But it could easily end badly.
(On the bright side, I’ve got a good feeling about Texas’s short-term NIT hopes.)
