Why Did Texas Hire Rodney Terry?

Texas fired Rodney Terry yesterday and hired Sean Miller. I don’t know why they timed it the way they did or whether this next part was intentional, but by the time Dailyn Swain put away Wednesday’s game, two years of little leaks had left the whole thing a foregone conclusion. Terry would be fired and Miller would be hired. That was where this was going, and that is where it’s went. There was a little reaction, but only a little one. Texas’s search drew less attention than Iowa’s. Nobody saw anybody turn Texas down.

I don’t know if this hire makes sense. I don’t know if this firing makes sense. What I’m least sure about is whether the previous hire makes sense. Not Chris Beard. That was the perfect hire, knowing only what was known at the time. I’m talking about giving Rodney Terry the full-time position. If everybody said, “Nice guy, not a great coach, will probably make the tournament but won’t give you much from there,” and if Rodney Terry proved to be a nice guy, and not a great coach, and able to make the tournament but not capable of giving Texas much more from there, and if everyone agrees that firing Terry was a sensible decision in the interests of maximizing Texas’s basketball success…why did Texas hire Rodney Terry? There was a reasonable expectation, and that expectation was met, and the coach who met that expectation was fired after only two full years on the job. That the firing isn’t crazy means the hiring was.

I live in Austin, and I’m a Longhorn sympathizer, but I’m not particularly enmeshed within UT athletics or the men’s basketball program. When I find people who are—whether they’re media, consultants, or staffers for another sport—I’ve liked to ask them about this, even before Terry did get the boot. “Why did Texas hire Rodney Terry?” The answer is always the same. “Well, they had to.”

This is a bad answer. Texas did owe Rodney Terry something after he kept Chris Beard’s self-torpedoed ship afloat. But they didn’t owe him an unreasonable standard and a quick firing when he didn’t meet it. Plenty of schools with smaller aspirations would have given Terry his third head coaching chance. He would have lasted longer at all of them.

Sometimes, the explanation offered involves Sean Miller. Even in 2023, Del Conte wanted Miller. That’s part of why he kept Terry, or so people say. Terry had beaten Miller in that tournament’s Sweet Sixteen. To some, letting an interim go in order to hire the man he beat would be a bad look.

Would it be a worse look than a program who recently made the tournament only four times in eight years going and firing a guy after back-to-back tournament berths?

Then, there’s Miller. A perfectly fine choice. A guy who coached two great teams at Arizona. A guy who only coached two great teams at Arizona, a school that does put together the occasional great team. Miller isn’t a bad coach. But when looking for reasons he’ll work at Texas, the best I can find is that he’s capable of holding a normal press conference even if he knows people are making fun of him. At Texas, that’s a big deal.

Miller’s still fairly young (56 years old), and Texas basketball does theoretically have resources, but this isn’t the hire you make if the goal is to win a national championship. This is the hire you make if you want to reach the second weekend every 2.5 years. It’s not a bad number (that’s Miller’s career average), but by kenpom, the guy’s only ever had those two top-ten teams. This is a safe hire. It makes it look like Del Conte’s goal for men’s basketball is to build a higher floor. Given the program’s history, that’s the right goal. But it’s a surprising one, given every other athletic program at Texas is tasked with winning a national championship. It’s also surprising given Terry did just make the tournament with a roster of his own creation.

During football season, we talk a lot about the importance of keeping boosters pulling in the same direction. This is Kalen DeBoer’s great challenge at Alabama now that his first year went poorly. He doesn’t have authority over his boosters. He can only hope for trust. That’s a dangerous position to occupy.

I’ve wondered how hard this piece is for Texas. I’ve wondered how hard it is to keep all these big hats pulling on the same rope. It would explain a lot about Del Conte’s approach: Quick responses when Steve Sarkisian’s name gets NFL mentions. A hiring without a search for the second-biggest sport at the school. Decisive action in medium-money sports like baseball. Del Conte acts confidently. He wastes little time. That’s probably a good strategy for self-preservation if you’re trying to keep oil men and tech couples and a meddling state government from going at one another’s throat.

If you apply the self-preservation lens to Del Conte’s Beard–Terry–Miller approach, it does make the approach make more sense.

1. Why did Texas fire Chris Beard at the moment it did? Because that’s the moment Beard’s lawyer started pushing back against Texas, a move that prompted concerns regarding Beard’s conscience (his lawyer implied the arrest wasn’t a big deal) but also—more transformationally—opened the door wider to infighting. By acting swiftly, Del Conte and his superiors avoided the speculation mill. I’m sure there was backlash, and I’m sure there still is backlash from some, but I’d guess it’s easier to handle backlash than it is to respond to meddling. Especially when the football team is good.

2. Why did Texas “have to” hire Rodney Terry? Maybe (and we said all this at the time) boosters wanted the guy who gave them their best season since Rick Barnes. If it wasn’t Terry, maybe those boosters were going to want to make a run at somebody. Maybe they wouldn’t have been satisfied with Miller, a man Texas had just beaten. Open the inbox for suggestions, and in March 2023, the suggestions would have been Scott Drew (which we now know, post-Kentucky search, would have never happened) and Jerome Tang (who was a stud at the time).

3. Why Miller? We wrote earlier this winter about how none of the obvious candidates for the job made sense. The big names showed with Kentucky that they didn’t want to leave their kingdoms. There aren’t any slam dunk up-and-comers the way Dusty May stood tall in last year’s mix. The in-state guys Texas could poach—Grant McCasland and Buzz Williams—are great coaches, but they aren’t Hollywood. Texas likes a little bit of Hollywood. Miller isn’t Hollywood either, but he knows his way around that environment. Tucson has a lot of California to it. For coaches, Tucson and Austin are more similar places to navigate than Austin and Lubbock and College Station. Fans are never going to adore Sean Miller. That’s fine. He’ll be comfortable in that territory, and provided the program rot isn’t even deeper than we’ve realized, he’ll do a fine job with NBA talent. More than anything, though, he’s acceptable. Chris Del Conte can move on now.

Maybe I’m underselling Miller. Del Conte’s pretty good at hiring his other coaches, even accounting for Texas’s willingness to outspend competition in every single sport but men’s hoops. Maybe Del Conte sees something in Miller. Maybe Miller will succeed handsomely, and the standout athletic director will be correct and this dumb local blogger will be wrong. My impression, though, is that Del Conte isn’t a college basketball guy. He’s a college sports guy, and he’s a state–of–Texas guy. The Moody Center is sweet. It’s a great place to see a concert, and it’d be a perfect WNBA arena. It’s also anything but a classic college basketball environment. It’s corporate. The Duke-imitating student section is awkwardly executed. It was pretty hostile for a while there, when they turned the speakers so loud you couldn’t hear sideline reporters on TV. Then the fans left and they turned those speakers down. It has a great beer selection, if you want college hoops to feel like Whole Foods.

Criticizing Del Conte isn’t my goal here. I like him. He’s also good at his job, which is to give Texas fans what they want. If anyone deserves criticism here, it’s the specific Texas fans to whom Del Conte answers. They were thrilled when Chris Beard fell into their lap right as they opened a groundbreaking new home court. For a year and a half, they were really into Texas basketball. At all other times? It’s just not a college basketball school. Austin is an NBA city in an NBA state. Texas is a football school in an every–sport–matters conference. Texas has enough resources that even cursory attention to low-money and medium-money sports drives results. Baseball and volleyball and swimming are doing great. Women’s basketball is doing great. But Texas doesn’t quite spend the money to compete in men’s basketball, and even if they did, money alone can’t get programs to that finish line. In basketball, it takes something more. It takes a motivator. A culture. An identity. Texas doesn’t have that. That’s why Texas hired Rodney Terry. Sean Miller doesn’t have that either. That’s why Texas hired Sean Miller.

This is a match made in 4-seed heaven.

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