The child is asleep in the carrier. The dog is asleep on her bed. I finally remembered where I left my water bottle this morning, which might make this the first time I’ve drank water today? Tom Herman’s gonna send me to Area 51.
I visited the Moody Center last night and watched Auburn play basketball. For the last few minutes, Texas also participated.
It was a stirring comeback, a testament to what this Longhorn team can do when Arthur Kaluma scores one hundred points and at least one teammate shows up for the last four minutes. It was also a frustrating game. Chendall Weaver hurt his hip, the crowd was muted, and for long stretches of the evening, Rodney Terry’s team looked like it didn’t know what to do.
A lot of college basketball players don’t know what to do. That’s part of the deal with college basketball. Some players, like Auburn’s Johni Broome, are otherworldly athletes already polished enough to play in the NBA. Others—let’s use college-era Jericho Sims as an example—have every piece of machinery an athlete could want but are still learning to use the controller. On a good college basketball team, most players know what they’re doing, and the few that don’t are deployed judiciously, their coach optimizing their use in situations where their gifts will shine with little risk.
Texas has a lot of players who should know what they’re doing.
Sometimes, none of them do.
Most troublingly, some of the players used to know what they were doing before they came to Austin. Jordan Pope knew what he was doing at Oregon State. Julian Larry knew what he was doing in Terre Haute. Here at Texas, they just run around like the rest of them.
This is the identity of Rodney Terry’s Texas Longhorns. A slew of affordably priced role-playing mercenaries lumped together into a product you’d expect at a transfer portal open gym. Watching them play at the state-of-the-art Moody Center feels like eating Subway at Buckingham Palace.
There was a loose expectation at Texas this summer that unless Terry broke through, it would be his last winter in town. A classic college basketball Good Guy, Texas felt they had to give Terry a chance after he held things together in 2023. Two years later, it’s clearly not working, and Chris Beard’s far enough in the rearview mirror that it’s time for another Next Great Coach.
The problem?
There isn’t an obvious Next Great Coach.
Jay Wright isn’t coming back to college basketball, let alone to coach at Texas. If Dan Hurley and Scott Drew weren’t leaving their posts for Lexington, they certainly won’t head south to Austin. Kelvin Sampson is approaching retirement, not preparing to start over. John Calipari just started doing his new thing at Arkansas.
The last two times Texas hired a head coach, there was an obvious perfect candidate, someone young and established and brilliant who fit an identity of the school. This time, nobody really fits that bill. The trend with established coaches is to stay where they stand if they have the right support, making Nate Oats an unlikely recruit. Among power conference schools clearly below Texas in resources, only T.J. Otzelberger, Chris Jans, and Grant McCasland pop as guys currently coaching good teams. Barring unexpected dominance into March, none of the three would arrive to as much fanfare as we typically see from a Texas new hire. Otzelberger is a genius but very much a Midwestern guy. Jans has a little weird baggage and tends to stay out of the limelight. McCasland is an absolute stud who’s spent his life in the Lone Star State, and he’d be a great hire who’d do well here in Austin. But Texas likes its basketball coaches to be “cooler” and trendier than the current Texas Tech head man. Texas wants to win the press conference. It wants to win the games too—it’s the best athletic department in the country for a reason—but it does want to win the press conference.
In most sports, Texas simply hires the best coach in the country, whether they appear available or not. This past year alone has seen Bob Bowman and Jim Schlossnagle head to Austin, the former a reigning national champion at Arizona State who famously coached Michael Phelps while the latter was the College World Series runner-up last summer at Texas A&M. In men’s basketball, though, Texas doesn’t out-resource its competition. In another sport, Nate Oats would leave Alabama. In men’s basketball, it’s hard to see Texas paying anything Kentucky wouldn’t, and it’s not clear it’d be easier to succeed here than it is in Lexington.
Maybe Terry’s team will really take a turn for the worse and force Chris Del Conte’s hand. Maybe a perfect fit will materialize and their current employer will fail to lock them up. But right now, with Texas still in a fine bubble position and Terry still a kind, harmless man, I’m inclined to think this isn’t the guy’s last season in Austin. Good for him. Probably not great for Texas basketball.
