Rodney Terry was low reward, a lower risk and not the cause of Texas Basketball's woes

It’s not fun sitting at home when there’s a dance at school.

[Order THE LONGHORN ALPHABET today and teach your little ones the A to Z’s of Texas Football!]

And with the Texas Longhorns finishing 19-16 under Rodney Terry and essentially missing the fun part of the tournament after a frustrating loss to Xavier in a play-in game, that’s how Texas fans feel. They’re angry because they’ve missed out on the dance. And they have the right to be upset about that and more.

Mostly at how this disappointing basketball season and yet another coaching search proves Longhorn basketball still doesn’t have an identity. That reality has been true for going on a decade and a half now. But I’d caution any online Horns fans to snuff out the flaming arrows aimed at coach Terry. Though Terry is gone and the last two seasons feel in vain after mighty Texas didn’t prove too big to outmuscle the probabilities on interim coach hires, the appointment was low risk.

Even if the potential rewards were too.

Ultimately under Terry, Texas fans have seen two seasons very similar to the last ten-plus. There’s the on court talent that doesn’t gel, offense that isn’t cohesive and a vision which was never clear. Why the ire online is so much greater for Terry when he did exactly what his predecessors did, I think I have an answer. Terry proved that there isn’t an easy answer to fix the Longhorn basketball program. You can’t simply plug a driver behind the wheel of someone else’s car in the case of Terry taking over for Chris Beard. Much of the consternation and the hand wringing is out of the reality Longhorn fans are still watching an aimless “your turn, my turn” basketball in March. And Longhorn nation was so close to not having that be the case just a few years ago. But for that, only Beard is to blame.

Terry did what interim coaches do. He kept the car on cruise control for as long as he could.

Despite the past two underwhelming seasons, the same benefits that existed at Texas prior to Terry still exist. There’s the new Moody Center, the SEC and the litany of Longhorn ambassadors in the NBA like Kevin Durant.

But, the same deterrents also still exist. The program possessed these issues prior to Terry, even during the tail end of Rick Barnes‘ tenure. Those same headwinds are still blowing into Longhorn Basketball’s face even with Terry gone and the dust of the Frank Erwin Center’s rubble scattered to the ends of Central Texas.

Texas Basketball is still (mostly) a first-weekend NCAA Tournament program.

The program still waits for years where there’s a transcendent one-and-done lottery pick to generate excitement in a season.

It has a fanbase that is hot and cold about hoops and tunes in and out.

If Texas wants a serious basketball program, it will need a leader who the fans engage with through peaks and valleys just the same. There’s also the inconsistent NIL donations to hoops. Does that improve after Terry? For one or two seasons in the glow of an exciting new hire: sure. Long term? Show me.

Over all of this is an umbrella of a chaotic college basketball ecosystem due to transfers and the one-and-done rule.

Terry didn’t build cohesive teams or rosters, but he also didn’t create an environment where good players like Arthur Kaluma play for four teams in four years. This era of team building isn’t exactly ripe for any coach.

All that to say, Terry didn’t solve any of these problems. But he didn’t create them, or even make them worse.

When Terry signed on, his contract was middle of the pack in the Big 12 coaching hierarchy. The $5.4 million buyout is steep and would be better spent on transfers. But it isn’t a weight that’s impossible to get out from under. Buying out Terry won’t have athletic department-wide ramifications like Jimbo Fisher’s did at A&M. In fact, the lower salary contract compared to Big 12 peers was an initial sign that the former UTEP coach was being treated with less buy-in than a new coach in a normal hiring situation would have gotten.

The coach took over an impossible situation when Beard was dismissed, won the Big 12 tournament then made a March Madness run. And the said run was one of the only fond memories Texas hoops fans have had since the late aughts. Some question why he was even hired without looking back at the fact that they too were tweeting to hire Terry in the excitement of 2023. Despite the odds of future success stacked against him, he still had the unanimous support of current and former players and even won the hearts of many fans. 

So to fire him after the Beard debacle and a near Final Four appearance would have been a public relations nightmare. And one doesn’t get the benefits of being Texas without feeling the weightiness of its crown. Texas simply has to weigh perception more than most universities do. Hiring Terry might have been a low-reward appointment. Not hiring him would have been much worse. It would have alienated the 2023 team which was mostly returning and all of your Longhorn NBA alums who voiced support for Terry. Those alums are the best thing Texas hoops has going for it from a recruiting perspective and to upset them would have put whoever the new coach would have been into a tire fire of their own.

The cost was two years to avoid a circus. Since those two seasons have been exactly the type of average play I’ve grown numb to expect from this program? Fine. It was almost worth it for the two wins over Texas A&M this season alone. It’s the job of the athletic department to make my expectations and my standards higher.

Now, bringing him back next season would have resulted in another tire fire. There’s essentially nobody on the team for next year because Terry’s chips were pushed in on making a run in 2025. But then came this putrid last month, the rough watch that this team turned out to be and the waste of freshman Tre Johnson.

Texas fans have deleted their online love letters to Terry from 2023. They are burned to ash in the internet’s fireplace.

I think back to when Texas made the hire. It was met with skepticism because of Terry being an interim appointment, but still it wasn’t without hope. And in the aftermath of the Beard mess, that was a feeling Texas basketball fans desperately needed. The optimism was probably ignorant because interim appointees usually fail. In fact, their success rate is so low I couldn’t even find statistics on how often they succeed in sports. They are almost as doomed to fail as the head coach who is about to be fired and gets carried off the field by his players. I am thinking of you, Les Miles.

When Terry was promoted from interim status to permanent head coach in the spring of 2023, the Longhorns’ social media and campus were lined with signage that read “Our Guy RT.” The slogan indicated Terry was a player’s coach with UT ties, calling back to his time on Barnes’ staff. But a firing only two years later indicates that Terry was only our guy in the sense he was familiar. He was never Chris Del Conte or the larger fanbase’s chosen guy to lead men’s hoops.

That nod of approval will go to someone else. Somebody who desperately needs to interject hope into the Texas fanbase. Yet again.

[Join Inside Texas TODAY for just ONE DOLLAR!]

Whoever that hire is will be tasked with building a real program and creating a basketball identity at a place that has seldom had one. What the new coach won’t have to do is clean up Terry’s mess. He hasn’t left any.