We have a lot of new readers this week, and we owe it to all of them to explain why we’re writing today about the NCAA T*urnament. We will make this quick.
In January of 2019, I moved to Austin, Texas. Immediately, Texas won the NIT. Shaka Smart was very nice to me at the NIT Final Four, so I obviously became a Shaka Smart ride-or-die, in accordance with protocol. While I’m still unsure if I like the Longhorns, five years after moving into their school district, I am intimately familiar with their programs. Here’s what to know about their matchup with Rick Barnes tomorrow:
1. They’ve run into each other recently.
In both 2022 and 2023, Tennessee and Texas met in the Big 12/SEC Challenge. They split the series. This open-door exhibition is the rubber match.
2. Tennessee fans have a weird obsession with Texas, independently of Rick Barnes.
I’m not sure how many Texas grads could locate Tennessee on a map, but if you spend enough time doing sports internet around Texas/Tennessee matchups (like that of the 2021 College World Series) a Tennessee fan will lose their mind at you for calling Texas ‘UT.’ In a world with two orange UT’s, the lesser of the two in athletics and other things has an inferiority complex. In accordance with protocol.
3. I don’t think Texas fans know yet how they feel about Rick Barnes.
So the deal with Texas fans is that most of them don’t start watching Texas men’s basketball until tomorrow. That’s how it goes at a lot of football schools, especially when the school has good volleyball, baseball, softball, women’s basketball, etc., but at Texas, where fans assume that A) they know what they’re talking about and B) they should expect Final Fours, it’s a little more extreme. There are going to be a lot of people at sports bars tomorrow excited about “this Max Abmas freshman.” This part is fine. We don’t need to gatekeep Texas basketball. Where it gets rough is that they will call for Rodney Terry to be fired if he does not beat Tennessee, and while Rodney Terry was not a good choice to be this school’s basketball coach, that is a terrible route to take to this conclusion.
How this wil all manifest itself with Rick Barnes:
Texas basketball fans—they exist, there are many, they are still vastly outnumbered—range from frustrated by Barnes to thinking he got a raw deal. Texas fans, on the other hand? The masses? The masses think he is the worst coach not named Shaka Smart to have ever walked a sideline. Which is great, because if Texas loses to Tennessee, which is what’s probably going to happen, the exasperation will be multiplied by the question, “How did we lose to this bum!!!” The people who wanted to fire Steve Sarkisian after the Red River Shootout are not known for withholding their opinions in the public sphere.
Texas basketball does have the potential to make a dent in Austin. All they need to do is bring back a former manager and grad assistant who’s a rising star in the coaching ranks, invest in a sparkling new arena, direct a lot of time and energy towards student and community outreach, and then have that coach not get arrested for allegedly choking and biting his fiancée and also not let his lawyer send a letter to the school saying The guy did nothing wrong!
Until then, they’re either going to beat Rick Barnes and clown him into oblivion before launching a campaign to get Rodney Terry a Calipari contract, or they’re going to lose and bite the heads off of birds while yelling about how Rick Barnes never wins in March because that’s what tget were told by their uncle who remembers 2015.
Speaking of Texas Basketball…
Brock Cunningham is the new all-time Texas Longhorn win leader. Which…I don’t know, the guy loves Texas, which I appreciate, and this is his fifth year they’re counting (evidently the redshirt season is not included, which implies they maybe know this is a bad look). It makes sense that Cunningham holds this record, but this will not age well. The winningest player in program history will be a guy who only won the trophy Texas fans care about the least—that of the Big 12 Tournament. And as we get back to a four-year world…that record’s gonna stand for a while.
The English Shohei Ohtani
In another explainer for new readers: We became fans of a little English soccer team named Burnley in 2019 because they were the most NIT-vibed team in the EPL at that time. (Are they still? I don’t know. It’s gotten a little worse. The lads may be in CBI territory these days.)
Burnley had a player back then named Ashley Barnes, a real shithouser of a man, like a Lance Lynn figure but British and playing soccer and playing a position where you’re supposed to score goals. (One of Burnley’s things back then was tying a lot of games 0–0. We absolutely loved this.)
Anyway, evidently Ashley Barnes has been kicked out of British horseracing.
I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. I’ve been trying to read the articles but they’re being really British about it all, technically speaking English but doing it in the most confusing way. Can anyone understand this??
From what I can tell, the story is that there was a horse named Hillsin who finished third in a race last summer under suspicious circumstances. It looked like the jockey was trying to finish third? Or trying to throw the race? There’d been a lot of odds movement back and forth. Temple basketball-style.
Did Ashley Barnes own that horse? No. But he and his father-in-law are registered owners of another horse or other horses, and the British Horseracing Authority (why is the BHA so funny to me) wanted phone records from them related to the Hillsin investigation. They said, Nope. No way.
I don’t know what Ashley Barnes was up to here, but I hope he was up to something, and I hope he never gets caught. The man is at his best when he is a thorn in a side.
NIT Talk
We’ll have a post up tomorrow morning previewing the first day of the second round, and we’ll have a post up on Sunday morning doing the same for the second day. A few thoughts for today:
- There has never been a blown call in a crucial moment in an NIT game. Samford? You chose your tournament.
- There was another NCAA T*urnament opt-out today, as Auburn’s Chad Baker-Mazara elbowed a Yale player in the chest in a successful effort to get kicked out of the game and to get his team out of the tournament early. Maybe if the NCAA T*urnament hadn’t moved its Final Four out of its historic home at NRG Stadium, this wouldn’t be happening.
- FAU would have done well in the NIT, but the NCAA To*rnament selection committee has an anti-mid-major bias.
- The NIT would never continue play on the same day a British princess and mother of three announced she has cancer. And it definitely wouldn’t have the nerve to keep talking about Cinderella!
