Shaka Smart Is Leaving Texas

Welp. There it is. Shaka Smart is going to Marquette.

There are a lot of feelings to be felt, and thoughts to be thought. As a refresher on how we (we being The Barking Crow) got here: In 2019, we moved to Austin. In 2019, Texas won the NIT. In 2019, Shaka Smart was nice to me at NIT Media Day (stuck around and gave me an interview even though he was about to leave when I walked up).

Because Shaka Smart was nice to me one time (and mean to me zero times), I became an ardent Shaka Smart supporter. This decision was supported by the praise of pretty much everybody who had ever interacted with Shaka Smart personally. I have never heard someone say a bad thing about Shaka Smart as a person, and while that isn’t a foolproof test, it’s a better sign than hearing people say bad things about him frequently, or even occasionally.

This year, after losing in the first round of a meaningless, stupid tournament, a number of folks around Texas wanted Shaka Smart gone. There was some rationality to this. There was some irrationality. They wanted Texas to consistently be a top-25 program. Shaka Smart wasn’t making that happen. They didn’t say this, though, because they were behaving dumbly. They instead pinned their fury on Shaka Smart not winning in the aforementioned meaningless, stupid tournament, distilling the whole of his tenure down into three dumb, close games. Had he won one of those, they would have felt differently. Had he won one and then won another right after it, Shaka Smart would probably still be at Texas. This is coin flip-type stuff, but reason is not something that is compatible with the lion’s share of fandom, or perhaps with just the lion’s share of humanity. We are not a rational species right now. In short: Texas fans wanted Shaka Smart gone, which was arguably reasonable. Their stated reason for wanting him gone was unreasonable. He is now gone.

There are three sides to this, as far as we’re concerned. There’s the Shaka Smart/Marquette side. There’s the Texas side. And there’s The Barking Crow’s side.

Shaka Smart/Marquette

This seems like a good job for Shaka Smart. It’s a rebuild, it’s in his home state, it’s a program one can win with but not a program with outlandish expectations. Smart will likely have some time to figure things out at Marquette. He will likely figure things out. He will get to coin flip games again, and perhaps this time the toss will land his way.

One aspect of the job that’s intriguing to me is what Smart’s off-court work might look like at Marquette. Smart graduated magna cum laude from Kenyon College. He’s done academic work related to the Great Migration. He campaigned for Obama when he was coaching at VCU. His wife, Maya Payne Smart, is a Harvard and Northwestern-educated writer and literacy advocate.

It’s possible Smart will stay largely quiet on non-basketball matters, which is what he did at Texas, chiming in this past summer with some wisdom but staying mostly basketball-focused. I’m curious, though, if at a Jesuit school, where the flexibility to speak on issues of race and culture is presumably much wider than it is at Texas (where football players were ordered to stay on the field this fall for a fight song with racist roots, because that’s what the donors wanted), Smart will become more vocal.

Obviously, whether Smart does or does not become more vocal is entirely up to him, and I don’t mean this as a “Shaka Smart should be more vocal” set of paragraphs. He should do whatever he wants to do. I’m just curious if this new environment will change anything on that front.

Texas

You idiots.

Texas might get Chris Beard, even though his ethos fits Texas Tech a lot better than it fits Texas.

But they also might not. Chris Beard is expensive. Near a Steve Sarkisian level of expense. And there could be a lot better jobs out there than Texas’s in the near-term future.

Chris Beard also might not work out at Texas. Or he might use Texas as a stepping stone.

Texas might get someone else good, too. Juwan Howard’s done well at Michigan, in the most recent example of a debut head coach succeeding, which I say only to say that you don’t need a proven college head coach to get a successful head coach. But Howard inherited a good team, which Texas does not right now have for next year, and there are plenty of coaches who just haven’t worked out. In the Big 12, it’s very easy to lose ten or more conference games every single year. Texas could well be on its way to doing that. That wasn’t going to happen every year with Shaka Smart, and again, it seems unlikely they’re going to have as good of a person as they had.

We’ll see where it goes. It’s a roll of the dice. But the odds are that Texas ends up with a worse coach than Shaka Smart. Is the upside higher? Sure. But the downside’s much lower, and it’s more likely.

The Barking Crow

Our business plan here has a lot of lottery tickets. They aren’t the only things, but they’re a part of it. One of those was, “Get a press pass at Texas, make friends with the press corps (legitimizing us in the eyes of the national media), become one of Shaka Smart’s favorites, ride that wave to some national prominence and perhaps a friendship with Shaka Smart, then convince Shaka Smart to push for the NIT to rise again to its rightful place as college basketball’s premier postseason tournament.” Was it likely? No. But it wasn’t an inconceivable path.

That lottery ticket lost.

For business, though, we could do worse than Shaka Smart at Marquette.

We aren’t going to blog about Marquette as closely as we blogged about Texas this year. We don’t know the program as well. We may have a section of the NIT Notes that’s explicitly dedicated to Shaka Smart’s work there, but they aren’t getting their own posts.

We also aren’t going to blog about Texas as closely as we blogged about Texas this year. We’ll weigh the merits of trying to break into that press corps, but it makes less sense without one of our favorite figures at the team’s helm. Might as well become a Texas State blog, especially since they might have the better team next year (yeah, I’m a little bitter, but I’ve also been reading the idiotic takes of the Texas ecosystem over the last few days).

This could all change, but that’s the immediate, gut-reaction guess for how this is going to go.

We will likely be in touch, content-wise, with the subject matter of Marquette basketball, though. For one thing, Shaka Smart will be there, and we love Shaka Smart, but for another, Marquette is reasonably likely to be an NIT contender. They’ve been something of a mainstay in the greater NITuation over the last few years (even if they’ve only made it once), they’re rebuilding, they play in a tough league…it’s all adding up. It’s possible Marquette is realistically a 2022 NIT favorite right now.

Marquette, in a lot of ways, is awesome. It’s in Milwaukee, which I’d argue is the Midwest’s second-best city larger than Fargo. It’s legendary in NIT circles, having turned down that other tournament in 1970 and won the NIT after bizarrely claiming Apollo 11 as something associated with them (this is one of college basketball’s best stories). Its fanbase cares a lot about basketball.

At the same time, though, that fanbase is kind of infamous in deeper cuts of college basketball for being outrageously self-important, even relatively to the rest of college basketball fandom. This is my perception, and I haven’t dug into it to verify (partially out of a desire to not dig into something so unpleasant), but if asked to name college basketball’s most delusional fans, I would without hesitation say Marquette’s. I hope I’m wrong about this, because it’d be a lot easier to join forces on Twitter with people who aren’t making me associate myself with aggressive, non-ironic idiocy, but this is my current read on the situation in whatever part of Milwaukee Marquette’s in.

If I am right, though, it might not be all bad. My perception is that Marquette fans defend their own, which is something that is not a thing at the University of Texas (except for those whose own is Robert E. Lee, of course). We can work with that. And if Shaka Smart wins a couple NIT’s there, Marquette fans may also, by virtue of the way they are, be among the most willing to jump fully onboard the NIT train.

Finally, there’s the matter of my relationship with the University of Texas.

The University of Texas is big. There are many parts to it. Some parts, I love. Some parts, I don’t love. The basketball program used to be one of the parts I love, and while I’m tempted to put it on the shit list now, I don’t think Shaka Smart is doing that, so I’m going to try to remain neutral. Will I cheer against Texas? No. Will I cheer for most of the Big 12 when they play Texas? Yes. But I do have some preexisting fondness for most of the Big 12. The Kansas schools. Iowa State. Oklahoma State. Jamie Dixon. Texas Tech. West Virginia. Oklahoma if they hire someone cool. Texas is now lumped in somewhere amidst all of those, and if you’re doing the math, yes, all that means is that I don’t like Baylor.

***

I am going to miss having Shaka Smart in Austin. Even if I didn’t see him often, it was nice knowing he was there. But, of course, I wish him the best, and I hope this is what the best is for him and his family.

It was fun.

It was cool.

I hope you flourish up there.

And I hope I see you soon.