Texas dominated Xavier last night, and the Rodney Terry hype has reached fever pitch. National and local media alike are pushing hard for the guy to be named the full-time coach, on the justified grounds that he’s earned it.
Has Rodney Terry earned the job? Sure. If this was a tryout, Rodney Terry passed on any possible grading scale. Not by advancing this far in the tournament—Texas should be expected to beat Colgate, Penn State, and Xavier—but by keeping the team good enough for this to be the expectation. The question is: Was this a tryout?
When Texas fired Chris Beard, the discussion of the coaching search often played out as follows: The expert would first be asked if there was any way Rodney Terry could get the job himself. “Maybe if they make a run to the Final Four,” the expert would say. Then, the expert would discuss the merits of John Calipari, the possibilities of Nate Oats, Kelvin Sampson, and Eric Musselman, and the likelihood of Scott Drew leaving Baylor. As the weeks went on, Oats took himself off that possibilities list and Jerome Tang placed himself on it, but the discussion was largely the same until these last few weeks, when the Rodney Terry fever roared up in earnest as Texas began to string together victories.
To revisit all those expert claims: Texas is probably going to make the Final Four. They’re favored over Miami on Sunday, and it’s only by four points, but that’s the biggest line of the Elite Eight. Texas is the likeliest team in the country to make this Final Four. Texas has, barring an upset, made just the run it was assumed they’d need to make. So: Were the experts right?
I don’t think “Final Four” was necessarily meant as a clear black-and-white line in those discussions. But if a line exists, it’s a reasonable place to put it, if for no other reason than that if Texas does make the Final Four, Chris Del Conte is going to have a lot of pressure to remove Terry’s interim tag. It’ll be a split mandate from his effective bosses, who will both want him to maximize future success and hire the guy who deserves it.
This split mandate is the problem for Del Conte right now, and it’s a good problem to have, but it puts Texas in a difficult spot. Only the biggest prisoner of the moment could claim Terry is a better coach than Sampson or Drew. It’s hard to make a case Terry’s a better coach than Musselman or Tang, though that’s at least arguable. Calipari never seemed like the best idea, but you could see it under the suspect logic that Texas boosters focus on football and don’t watch that much basketball. Terry likely wouldn’t do badly as the full-time coach, but he’s extremely unproven in the capacity, having worked a very different job this season than what the full-time job will be.
I don’t know what Del Conte will or should do. I suspect it still depends on what happens from here. Is this a tryout? Or was there nothing Terry could do to get this job?
Thoughts on the other three games:
It wasn’t shocking to see San Diego State beat Alabama, because we’ve been hearing all week now about how the Aztecs are a bad matchup for the Tide. The game went exactly as those analysts said it would: San Diego State suffocated Nate Oats’s team behind the three-point line.
A lot of people have pointed out that Villanova recently won the title shooting just about as many threes as Alabama shoots. That is true, Villanova did that. But Villanova, in 2018, shot 40.1% from beyond the arc. Alabama, in 2023, shot 33.5%. It’s different to shoot a lot of threes when you’re good at shooting them.
It was only a little shocking to see Miami beat Houston, because Miami accustomed us last year to their capability of making a run like this. Still, what a performance by Nijel Pack. Just as we’d known Alabama could lose if they didn’t make threes, we’ve known Houston could lose if the offense had a rough night, but that isn’t fully what happened. Houston scored enough points to win this game. Miami just scored more. In a very Drew Timme performance, they responded to their defensive weaknesses by outgunning their opponent. They didn’t play badly on defense—it was one of their best defensive games of the season, you could argue—but Nijel Pack just buried the Cougars. With that, UConn becomes the best team in the country, per KenPom.
Princeton gave Creighton trouble, but Creighton kept them at enough of arm’s reach to never need to get scared. The 1–3–1 was trouble, but the Jays got the ball into the post enough times—and most importantly, scored enough times once they were in there in a triple-team—to hold off the Tigers. Creighton fit the champion mold coming into this of being top 25 both offensively and defensively in KenPom, and now they’re a narrow favorite to make the Final Four, which probably makes them the narrow favorite to make the national championship from the left side of the bracket, considering how the remaining teams in the South and the East compare.
Today’s games:
I’m very, very curious about Markquis Nowell’s ankle, and I think it’s interesting that FAU is favored on KenPom, which anecdotally seems to be having a very strong tournament. FAU doesn’t look as good as they are, I don’t think. Kansas State looks better than they are.
It’s interesting that UConn has to play Gonzaga in Las Vegas. Las Vegas isn’t all that close to Spokane—it’s 100 miles further than Chicago is from New York—but that’s a city to which Gonzaga fans are used to traveling. I didn’t get a great idea of which way the crowd leaned on Thursday, but it’s an interesting wrinkle. UConn is the better team, UConn is the more well-rounded team, but Gonzaga has this clear path to beating them which stems from their offensive consistency. You would think that if UConn were to struggle on offense, it would come against a better defense than that of the Zags, but that doesn’t have to be true. UConn’s losses have more often followed the pattern of the Huskies being outgunned than the Huskies being shut down. It should be a race. Emphasis on “should.”
