Shooting From the Offseason: a Review and a Look Ahead

Setting expectations for the fans and the program

Chris Beard finished his first season at Texas this week, and the fan discourse has been swirling around whether or not the season was a success. Some of the points are valid, some are hyperbole, and goalposts are being moved faster and further from their original position than a Russian oligarch’s secret yacht. I thought I would take a step back and look at this year from a larger view.

Chris Beard & the “Better than Shaka” Argument

Many of the people who are feeling positive about the program’s trajectory are basing this view at least partially on the idea that Beard has done something Shaka Smart never did, win a game in March. And that is absolutely true, full stop. 1 win > 0 wins, math checks out. I guess my question is less about whether his postseason success is better than Shaka’s or if that’s the relevant question to be asking. For me the question is “what’s the bar for success at Texas” and that bar should be independent of who the previous coach was. I’ve been mulling this over for awhile, and it occurred to me that I’ve already taken a stab at this once before. Those of you who followed me over from Barking Carnival may remember that I wrote an article laying out what I considered realistic goals for a coach at Texas - you can click on this link to see how I came up with these goals - and they were basically as follows:

1. Make the NCAA tournament roughly 75% of the time.

2. Make the Sweet 16 in approximately 50% of their tournament appearances.

3. Make a Final Four run approximately 1 out of every 5 tournament appearances.

4. Win a National Championship once every 20-25 years.

I wrote this article when Rick Barnes was still the coach, and I don’t think anything that has happened in the intervening 8 years (christ, I wrote that 8 years ago) has changed the fundamental dynamics of what Texas can be at its peak. So how did Chris Beard do?

1. Make the NCAA tournament roughly 75% of the time. Check!

2. Make the Sweet 16 in approximately 50% of their tournament appearances. Nope.

3. Make a Final Four run approximately 1 out of every 5 tournament appearances. Nope.

4. Win a National Championship once every 20-25 years. Nope.

Obviously, it was highly unlikely Beard (or any coach) was going to nail all four of those in his first season, and the thing about these goals is that they allow for some variance and time to get up to speed. These goals are also what I would hope for from a Texas program operating at its peak, so it’s possible to be in the ballpark and still feel like things are “good enough”. Reasonable minds can differ on how close Texas needs to be to be to this bar to satisfy them, but more to the point if Texas as a program is in this realm of tournament results then they’re probably doing well enough in other areas (conference wins, top-25 rankings, etc.) that our collective grievances will be relatively minor. There could be an outlier where the tournament success doesn’t reflect a program that is fully realizing itself in the regular season - I’m looking at you, Syracuse - but that seems somewhat unlikely in the scope of things.

I like this general concept because it removes the “is Coach X doing better/worse than Coach Y” angle and makes it a more objective barometer. (I guess it doesn’t entirely remove that angle as this is based upon the best Rick Barnes years, but given his 8-year run in the 2000s is the apex of the program it’s probably the best measuring stick we can manage.) It also doesn’t depend so much on what a coach is promising in press conferences, so we’re free to stop listening to the sales pitch of the moment at our leisure, which is generally a good life choice for fans regardless of the sport or coach.

So Beard Isn’t There Yet, But..

If Beard isn’t there yet, the inevitable question that follows is if/when he will be. After one year that’s a difficult question to definitively answer, so I think it’s reasonable to look at the potential stumbling blocks and decisions he and his staff will need to make going forward that will likely determine if they can make a run at maximizing Texas. Of the possible stumbling blocks, one looms larger than the rest.

The Roster

Chris Beard inherited a pretty empty roster - you’ll be stunned to hear a recruiting class full of Shaka’s players, one of whom explicitly mentioned wanting to play for an African-American coach, didn’t exactly warm up to Chris Beard - and he filled it with transfers. It’s an entirely understandable and practical thing to do in the situation, and I can understand how he might not have been able to be as picky as he’d like given the sheer number of holes he had to fill. Going through the transfer portal and trying to grab the best available players is a reasonable plan, though he probably should have tempered expectations a bit when he got them all under one roof and saw their combined skills. (I know there’s no way in hell Beard would do this because he is always, always selling the program’s upside in an attempt to generate fan interest, but if Texas fans started the season thinking the Longhorns were closer to the team they ended up being it might have made for less grousing as the Big 12 leaders started to show the gap between them and the Longhorns. But I digress.)

Here’s the problem: he’s probably about to have to do the same thing again, and it didn’t have to be this way. Before I get to that, let’s review the roster heading into next season.

• Gone: Jase Febres, Tre’ Mitchell, Avery Benson, Tristen Licon

• Technically eligible for a COVID year: Timmy Allen, Christian Bishop, Marcus Carr, Andrew Jones, Courtney Ramey

• Seniors: Brock Cunningham, Dylan Disu

• Juniors: Devin Askew

• Sophomores: JohnTravoltaStaringIntoSpace.gifv

• Freshmen: Rowan Brumbaugh, Dylan Mitchell, Arterio Morris

Here is who I think will be around.

• Seniors: Christian Bishop, Brock Cunningham, Dylan Disu

• Juniors: Devin Askew

• Sophomores: JohnTravoltaStillStaringIntoSpace.gifv

• Freshmen: Rowan Brumbaugh, Dylan Mitchell, (probably) Arterio Morris

That’s seven players, better than 12 months ago but still with a ton of holes to fill. Beard and crew are going to have to go out and snag another 5-6 transfers and they’ll be in the same mode they were this time last year. Could it work out better this time? Sure, but it may not.

Consider this alternative:

• Seniors: Christian Bishop, Brock Cunningham, Dylan Disu, Tre’ Mitchell

• Juniors: Devin Askew

• Sophomores: Jaylon Tyson

• Freshmen: Rowan Brumbaugh, Dylan Mitchell, Arterio Morris

That’s a solid core with much less turnover, and now Beard is in a position to be selective by getting 2-3 transfers to fill specific needs (like rim protectors, athletic wings, or a shooting guard who can rain threes) instead of ransacking the transfer portal like a Walking Dead character running through a decaying Super Target, grabbing 3 boxes of Twinkies on a dead run as the zombies bust through the front door. (I may or may not be describing how Texas ended up with 3 players who all do the same thing, there’s no way to tell, this is inadmissible in a court of law, I plead the fifth.) When I reference #BeardChurn and the headwinds it creates, these are the some of the headwinds. Running off players with eligibility left means more holes to fill every off-season. And while players transferring is endemic in college basketball, it happens to Beard more than most and the ripples are felt months and even years later.

Anyway, there’s a way out of this, but it has consequences.

Go Young & Take Your Lumps

I know the mantra among many high-major coaches is “get old and stay old”, but the people who are saying that - Self & Drew, among others - tend to skip past the part where they’re still taking a number of freshmen each season so their “get old” portion is 2-3 players rather than 5-7. These coaches are working from a situation where their talent pipeline on both ends of the eligibility spectrum is pretty balanced; they don’t have, say a gaping hole where a sophomore class should be. Chris Beard does not have this luxury, but he can get there if he’s willing to eschew short-term fixes for long-term gains. He needs to put in a couple of consecutive classes with 4-6 recruits, ideally with most of them being multi-year players. (Loading up on 3-4 one-and-done players doesn’t fix this math, either.) You can look at a year like 2018 where Shaka landed Ramey, Hepa, Brock, Liddell, and Hayes as the kind of class I’m thinking of, or if you want a Barnes version the 2013 class with Croaker, Yancy, Martez Walker, and Isaiah Taylor also fits. Maybe Beard can go into the remaining ‘22 class and find a couple more players of this general mold - pickings are a bit slim this late, and Beard has to unexpectedly replace a couple of assistants who left for other programs (Maligi to Kansas State & there’s talk of Howard heading to Louisville) - but this may have to be something that starts with the ‘23 class. It will take a couple of years and some patience from fans, but given that Beard probably has at least four seasons to show real improvement there’s still time to build a foundation of players that could produce dividends 2-3 years from now.

If, you know, he doesn’t run them all off in the interim. That also helps.

This idea isn’t a Texas-specific thing, either; Beard was able to hit the ground running at Texas Tech in part because his first two years had the core Tubby Smith left him. He had guys like Keenan Evans and Norense Odiase already there and he (correctly) supplemented the team with transfers to send them on an upward trajectory. What I’m suggesting is Beard setup a situation where two years from now his roster construction is in a similar position that it was when he took off for the Elite Eight. It just might mean a down season next year, and the downside for this argument is that nothing about Chris Beard says “I’m willing to have a down year for any reason whatsoever” so I’m probably tilting at windmills even suggesting this path, but he may yet surprise me.

The Decision At Hand

My intent with this discussion is not to make it seem like Beard is at a precipice from which he can never recover; he can continue down the path he’s on now and it’s possible it pans out for him and Texas fans. But I look at this situation and can’t help but think about the issues Shaka Smart had his first couple of seasons, where he would grab as many 1-year guys as he could and how difficult it made for him to create continuity going forward, to the point that by the time he had worked the air bubbles out of the system the Longhorns faithful had largely checked out. I’m also reminded of the late Barnes years when he was increasingly making recruiting decisions based upon short-term fixes rather than long-term continuity and the way that manifested as teams with limited ceilings who rarely lived up to their preseason billings. I’m not convinced that going after short-term results harder than an Enron executive at the end of a fiscal quarter (topical humor!) is the right path for a coach who seems to understand just how fleeting burnt orange attention spans are for his sport. Trying to figure out if butts will appear in seats 29 months from now if he has a couple of 18-14 seasons in a row while laying the groundwork for later success versus if the butts will appear in seats 29 months from now if he has three seasons in a row where he wins 20 games but no discernible progress has been made in March is a tough choice, but this kind of choice is why the paychecks are so large. Early returns suggest he might be trying to split the difference by convincing guys like Bishop to utilize their COVID year, but we will get a better idea of the path he has chosen in the weeks to come.

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Writing tunes provided by Gai Barone.