So, Rodney Terry

I hear people have opinions on the man

I started writing this on January 18th, but I’d been thinking about it for a couple of weeks beforehand. Actually, some form of this has been burbling about in the recesses of my brain for awhile because - like a child who continues to touch a hot stove over & over to feel alive - I read internet comments of sports articles. There are recurring themes to the Longhorns basketball comments:

1. Rodney Terry was the emotional hire, not the logical hire. This pops up after every loss like some sort of astroturfing campaign by a marketing firm hired by Chris Beard, amplified by fans who never thought he should have been fired for “allegedly” beating the hell out of his fiancée. I’ve seen some form of this comment since the first loss of the 2023-2024 campaign, some people were done with Terry from the jump.

2. I don’t care about Texas basketball any more, when do we get the new guy. These happen more often this season, and are more often from names I recognize.

3. Why are Shaka & Barnes & Beard thriving while Terry is not, nothing matters, there is no god. You know what? Fair.

4. I’m just saying, Hitler had some good points. Sorry, that was from the SurlyHorns politics forum. And the Inside Texas politics forum. And the Orangebloods politics forum. And Twitter. Oh god, so much of Twitter.

The thing is, none of these are without merit. (Except #4; I would like to believe nobody agrees with #4, but in light of recent events..) I’d like it noted that even before Rodney Terry was named the permanent head coach, I had doubts about the ceiling of the program under his watch. For those who don’t want to click the link, here’s a screenshot of the relevant bits:

Has he done anything to move me off that stance? Not really, no. That said, I think there’s room for more nuance as it pertains to the current Texas head coach; some of it is less about him and the job he’s doing and more about the expectations of Texas fans, but we’ll get into that in a bit. For now, let’s just talk about Rodney Terry.

First of all, the man can recruit:

Terry doesn’t need a swagcopter, he is the swagcopter. The man has Aggie women unironically on board with his hire in a way Buzz Williams does not. Perhaps if Buzz sweat fewer than 4 gallons per game, he might turn this thing around; speaking as a fellow heavy sweater - RIP my overworked, perpetually moist t-shirts; your pit stains are as dark as the landfill you now inhabit - he’s probably just going to take the L on this topic.

What’s interesting to me about the Terry Tenure¹ is that you can make a case for or against him and both sides have merit; Terry is not obviously crushing it or obviously flaming out, to date he resides in an zone that is both not at the peak of Texas’ program and not near its nadir. He’s not amazing, he’s not terrible, he’s...fine? Reasonably competent? I don’t want to say mid because I think most people think ‘mid’ actually means ‘bad’, but he’s in a zone where it doesn’t feel like there’s some imminent need to either lock him up to a huge contract or to toss him out an airlock. So where does he actually rank among current coaches?

I Wasn’t Kidding

A Point of Comparison

I compiled a list of every 2nd or 3rd-year coach in the biggest conferences in D-I (Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, & SEC) and how their seasons have ended. The yellow cells are from Bracket Matrix as of February 13th.

The screenshot is sorted by how they did in their first season. Needless to say, Terry started out hotter than nearly anyone, and other than John Scheyer his postseason results are on par or better than most of the list over that span. The negative here is that the trajectory for Texas is downward, but it’s still (as of now) 3 out of 3 tournaments for a program that wandered the desert for a few years. Again, not the apex but also not awful.

Another One

The SRS Data

SRS is something the Sports Reference site uses to provide a year-agnostic method of comparing teams in various sports. If you want to read more detail about it, you can click this link, but the short version is that it uses a combination of point differential & perceived opponent strength to come up with a positive or negative value for a given team in a given year. In their example:

For instance, the 2006-07 Spurs won games by an average of 8.43 points per game and played a schedule with opponents that were 0.08 points worse than average, giving them an SRS of 8.35. This means they were 8.35 points better than an average team. An average team would have an SRS of 0.0.

There are limitations to this formula, most notably that it doesn’t care about wins or losses. It would see a 30-point win and a 5-point loss as a better outcome than a pair of 7-point wins, which diverges from how fans tend to view things. But that said, it gives a reasonable approximation of a team’s strength over the years.

Here are what it views as the top 20 seasons in Texas men’s basketball history as of February 14th:

How many of these results surprised you? Probably a few, in no small part because it doesn’t view March Madness games any differently than regular season games. I don’t think any of us would rank the Final Four season as the 5th-best season in Texas history, though I suspect some of the early Barnes years are being dragged down by the Big 12 of the early 00s not being nearly the gauntlet it was a decade later. Would you put Abe Lemons’ NIT title team above the Shaka Smart 3-seed season? Even with the abysmal March Madness upset & the NIT being a bigger deal back then, I doubt it. So take this with a grain of salt as to the exact rankings; what I think is relevant is that all three of Terry’s seasons are in the top 15. There’s only one Shaka Smart & zero Tom Penders teams ahead of his seasons, and the current season sits roughly on par with the one complete Beard year. This season has been up & down, alternating between very fun and very frustrating, but not a cataclysm.

I Swear These Aren’t All From the Same Account

The Rutgers Situation

I’m not sure how closely most people other than college basketball degenerates or NBA draftniks are following Rutgers this season, but I bring them up because Steve Pikiell has a pair of top-5 draft picks on his roster in Dylan Harper & Ace Bailey. They didn’t come out of nowhere, they were top-5 recruits with offers from everybody and ended up at Rutgers. Rutgers. They have both lived up to their billing; Harper looks like he’s probably the top non-Cooper Flagg pick as a 6-6’ PG and Ace Bailey is 6-10’ & hitting 37% from three on the year. They’re both monsters.

As of Sunday, Rutgers is 12-14.

Steve Pikiell pulled all the NIL rabbits out of a hat he possibly could, was gifted a pair of NBA starters, and is missing every tournament of note. I bring this up because I don’t think Texas fans really gave Terry enough credit last year for putting together a team that was four points away from the Sweet Sixteen despite his roster missing a pair of 1st-round picks. Ron Holland (5th pick) and AJ Johnson (23rd) were both committed to Texas before pulling out after Texas’ Elite Eight season ended in the latest NBA-level decommitments I can ever recall for any high-major team. Talent is a huge part of the game and you can ding Terry for losing their commitments, but there is zero way to replace that level of talent in April & you have to recognize he made chicken salad out of chicken shit. Terry inverse Pikielled, if that makes sense.

It’s Even Become a Meme online

Ex-Coach Psychosis

There’s no way to quantify this, but I suspect a plurality of Texas fans would be at least somewhat more chill about Terry’s tenure² if they weren’t watching the last 3 Texas coaches having success elsewhere. Barnes ‘resigned’ but really just needed a change of venue to reset & continue being the eventual Hall of Fame coach he is, Shaka left about 5 minutes before the pitchforks arrived & ended up at a school that fit him far better than Texas, and Beard left in prison stripes. It was the correct decision to move on in all three cases; and yet all three of them are having some level of success at their new place that (roughly) meets or exceeds what they did at Texas. I’m happy for two of them. I imagine this means Texas fires Terry, he takes the Nevada gig, and immediately makes the Sweet Sixteen while his replacement goes 5-13 in the SEC and I set myself on fire in front of Moody Center.

Hammers Looking for Nails

While we’re on the subject of entirely subjective views, some people in a Texas Discord server - for the olds: Discord is like a forum, but you can’t use TapATalk - brought up a point that seems salient: so many Texas sports are either doing extremely well right now (football, volleyball, women’s basketball, softball, etc.) or have a theoretical top-notch hire (baseball) that any sport sticking out as underperforming is going to seem even worse by comparison. Maybe consider this in terms of the early Shaka years; Tom Herman & Karen Aston having some down years between 2018-2020 meant Shaka Smart’s struggles might have flown a bit more under the radar for normie/casual fans, but Rodney Terry has no such cover. Relatively speaking, he’s the lagging program.

In Summation?

I think the way I would describe Rodney Terry is “medium ceiling, medium floor”. I do not think Texas is likely to make a Final Four with him at the helm, and I do not think he’s going to regularly have Texas contending for SEC conference titles. That said, I also do not think he’s likely to ever have an abysmal season for reasons of his own making; nothing about how he’s operated the first 3 years at Texas implies there’s an 11-22 season incoming, and as long as the NIL money keeps flowing, he’s probably going to have Texas in the NCAA Tournament nearly every year. He has Texas in position to be one of 18 P4 schools who have made the last three tournaments in a row, which isn’t flashy but it’s also not a given. It’s unlikely there will be a major scandal on his watch, to a person everyone I know who knows the man speaks highly of his character. Texas will be decent to good under Rodney Terry, but it will rarely be great. Late-tenure Barnes felt bad because we had grown used to a higher level, but it’s also better than Texas has been for the majority of the decade since he left (or the decades before he arrived) and that’s roughly where Rodney Terry resides now. It’s the level of success that allows for patience, if one so chooses.

Whether that’s enough for you is something you’ll have to answer for yourself, and I understand people falling on either side of that divide. Personally, I am (with a caveat) okay with that for now; it’s not ideal, and nobody’s going to hang banners for “pretty good”, but I’m risk-averse by nature and to me the potential downside of a change is larger than the potential upside. Let me explain the caveat.

Who Ya Got?

There’s a view of college basketball coaches I may or may not have explicitly stated before, but should probably post from the start to help clarify why I am where I am on the cost/benefit calculations of a coaching change: I think somewhere around 70% of college coaches are successful (or not) as much if not more due to the environment around them than their individual abilities. I’ve been to enough coaching clinics & watched enough YouTube videos of coaches showing other coaches systems & concepts over the years that I’ve seen guys people think are bums eloquently teach a group of players a system & other coaches are taking notes from said bum. I saw Mike Woodson - currently being shoved into Lake Michigan by Hoosiers fans for being a bum - at a Larry Brown coaching clinic once, and he ran the SMU players through a shell drill that helped the coaches in attendance better understand the system he was explaining. Mike Woodson, the guy everybody is pantsing online, is a knowledgeable enough coach that a HoF coach like Larry Brown invites him to teach at the same coaching clinic as Bill Self & Shaka Smart. These guys know ball, and yet most of them fail. Maybe it’s an issue of talent turnover, maybe it’s NIL money drying up, maybe they don’t know how to delegate; maybe they decide to spend more time with their dead twin brother’s widow than they do buttering up the big money donors. There are relatively few Bill Selfs or Rick Pitinos out there who know how to optimize every coaching stop and have the mental fortitude to deal with whatever a fanbase throws at them. And even they sometimes fail. I think Rodney Terry is in that majority of coaches who rise and fall with their program’s investment - I’d probably put him at the higher end of that majority, but that’s purely subjective & also not really the point - so the question for me to move off of the position of giving him more time is: who are you bringing in that’s outside of that 70%?

If there was a sure-fire upgrade waiting in the wings, I’d be more open to moving on, but it feels like most of the ‘up & coming’ coaches have been poached by bigger fish. There are a handful of jobs I would consider at or above Texas in the hierarchy, and they’re filled with schools who tend not to open up often. But in the last 3-4 years, the following schools have all made a coaching change: Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisville, Indiana, Louisville, & Arizona. These are schools who coaches tend to circle as final destinations & will get agents to pick up the phone if they call, and they’ve had significant turnover recently relative to history. The result is that some coaches who might have been open to Texas before are now getting paid well to not listen to CDC for more than leverage to get a salary bump where they are now. Pat Kelsey, Mark Pope, & Tommy Lloyd are probably not voluntarily moving from their current gig, and you can throw in Nate Oats & T.J. Otzelberger with what Alabama & Iowa State are doing to keep them happy (money & unlimited smedium polo shirts, respectively). These are five of the relatively few “young” coaches who I would consider outside of that 70%, and they’re spoken for unless CDC pulls some serious black magic.

So who is left? Todd Golden would be a more interesting name if Golden and members of his staff weren’t making the news for things that should make Longhorns fans squeamish about sending him an eight-figure check. Jay Wright is visibly enjoying being in studio & Billy Donovan has spent a decade not listening to any overtures from any college programs. John Calipari found the spot he’s going to retire and/or be murdered at in Arkansas. Grant McCasland & Chris Jans are names I’d listen to, and if Rick Pitino were a decade younger well then now we’re talking; most of the other names out there I wouldn’t consider sure-fire upgrades over Terry, and/or their results are scarce enough to be a leap of faith or middling enough that now we’re just talking about a change for the sake of change which isn’t a persuasive argument to me, given what I’ve already said about Terry.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s nobody out there - I know Jeff Haley is barreling in here like the Kool-Aid Man who discovered Ozempic to plant his Kyle Smith flag, and I’m willing to listen - I just think the market is a little thin right now, and that’s before we consider the real possibility that two of the teams I mentioned as being fish as big or bigger than Texas (Indiana & North Carolina) possibly being in the market and interested in the same coaches as the Longhorns. This is shaping up to be a market where Indiana money-whips Dusty May, North Carolina snags Eric Musselman, and Texas overpays for like, Sean Miller; that’s not really the kind of coaching change that I think would inspire Texas fans. They want to feel the way they did when Chris Beard was hired, and I don’t know that that guy is out there. I mean, that guy is out there, he’s in Mississippi where the police don’t file reports on head coaches. But not that that g- you know what, you know what I mean.

All that said, dangle Royal Ivey in my face and I might dump this whole blog into the Atlantic Ocean from 30,000 feet. I realize Ivey falls into the “scarce results” category - and given how he was basically Rooney Ruled the last time CDC looked for a new coach, he may not be interested any more - so this one qualifies as a leap of faith hire, but if they’re going to make a big swing on a relatively untested name then this one is the one I’d want. Texas could use some of that South Sudan coaching magic.

1. patent pending!

2. just waiting on the paperwork!