Texas travels to Knoxville to face No. 21 Tennessee

Eleven years after the Texas Longhorns fired Rick Barnes, the Longhorns program has been wandering in the wilderness heading into Tuesday’s matchup against the program’s longtime head coach, now leading the No. 21 Tennessee Volunteers.

It took seven years and another coaching change to win an NCAA Tournament game and even the Elite Eight run the following year, was marred by scandal and leveraged athletics director Chris Del Conte into settling for removing Rodney Terry’s interim tag, a decision that resulted in one tournament win and wasting Tre Johnson’s one year on the Forty Acres before Terry’s firing, the third head coach to fail at Texas since Barnes was let go.

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How are things going with the fourth head coach, Sean Miller, whose pinnacle of success came a decade ago in a college basketball landscape that no longer exists?

Well, Texas is 9-4, may struggle to finish over .500 and has tournament odds that dropped more than 20 percent after Saturday’s overtime loss at home to Mississippi State in what was tied for the most winnable game left on the schedule, producing an unusually candid post-game press conference from Miller, even by his standards.

The overarching metaphor was of a parent repeatedly telling their child not to cross the street, only to see their child cross the street and get hit by a bus. It’s an apt metaphor for a Longhorns team that regularly commits what Miller terms as “stupid basketball plays” like allowing the opposing team’s best player to use a basic move to produce the game-deciding three, fouling a three-point shooter 27 feet from the basket (“That’s the guy you want to play against. That’s not the guy you want to have on your team.”), regularly lose effort plays, and prove unable to capitalize on the built-in advantages produced by the basic pick-and-roll coverages that Texas runs.

It’s a bleak view of a team that Miller admitted isn’t talented enough to have any margin for error in those categories…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/texas-travels-knoxville-face-no-183754596.html

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Publish date : 2026-01-06 18:37:00

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