Bitterwhiteguy

*stares in Osetkowski*

Worth noting he's had to build that program from nearly the ground up, and he was starting to do the same at Oklahoma State when Illinois offered to pay him what OSU wouldn't. Pretty sure OSU would like to have him back right about now. His history at SFA is also pretty great.

Depends on how the new coach handles it, whoever replaces Shaka may be dealing with a somewhat similar situation as he did when he came in. There was very little turnover due to how many players were upperclassmen, but it also meant his first "real" class was going to have to be huge. Shaka lost 7 players after his first season to graduation & Zay going pro and the recruiting decisions made - only retaining Barnes' commits and adding Tevin Mack plus losing out on De'Aaron Fox in the next class - were a major reason why he's been behind the eight ball most of his tenure. If Shaka is let go at the end of the year, whoever his replacement is will have to make some pretty significant decisions very early on if they want to avoid a repeat of Shaka's 2nd season where he won 11 games. It's possible to mitigate some of this by mining the grad transfer market, as an example, but whoever takes over will have to get creative to avoid a potentially big drop-off in the second season. Beard has been good at hitting the transfer market - Owens & Mooney, specifically - but having Culver stick around another year and having Moretti in his second year on the squad helped just as much. Whoever would take over for Shaka may not have a Culver sitting on his roster in the '21-'22 season. Donovan Williams might be that guy if he doesn't transfer when Shaka leaves, but I'm not assuming any current freshman/sophomore is sticking around until the dust settles.

As of right now there is only one available scholarship for Texas in 2020, and they're holding that for Greg Brown. If somebody transfers, more spots open up.

Texas could do worse, but it would underwhelming and I don't see him being a marked improvement over Shaka. He's made the tourney once in the last 3 years (and probably missing again this year), he missed the tourney twice his last 5 years at Pitt, and the Pitt AD/fans were getting ready to shove him out the door when he left for TCU. He's also making a bit more than Shaka so you're looking to pay more than Shaka for similar results. IMO if you're going to get rid of Shaka, you're doing it to take a leap forward rather than a lateral move.

Chris Mack was openly swiping right on Louisville's coaching gig for the entirety of Padgett's interim tenure; he wanted that job badly. Louisville is paying him about $4m/year and the buyout is $5.5m, I don't think he's leaving Louisville for Texas.

There's a valid argument to be made that VCU has a tendency to make their coaches look good; Shaka, Capel, McCarthy, & Grant all had shaky results at their next stop. Will Wade is bucking the trend at LSU, though there's a FBI van following him to the grocery store due to his dalliances with paying players so maybe there are 'external' reasons he's bucking the trend.

Johnny Jones' LSU team with Ben Simmons was remarkably bad.

It's true.

Since the money is guaranteed, nothing beyond what might happen if someone (Yaklich, Berry, whoever) is named interim HC and potentially getting some sort of pay bump if they have that contingency in their contract. I would imagine the main counter-argument to firing him now - aside from the "Texas doesn't do this" one mentioned earlier - is trying to keep players from portaling before the new HC is selected; any time you bring a new HC in the whole program is overhauled, and it might not be wise to kneecap the incoming HC with a roster that's already half-gone. We saw what happened to Texas when Shaka's first class was underwhelming (in part due to having to hold Barnes' last class together) then the next year he lost half the roster to graduation; if there's a way to make that transition smoother for the new coach it would be worth considering. Maybe the new coach doesn't want any of the existing players, but at least give him the choice to retain them. Like people have noted, the money on Shaka is already spent; paving the way for the replacement to hit the ground running is probably a wise strategy.

As the percentage of revenue coming from TV deals becomes larger, the sight of a half-empty arena becomes less important to the people running the business of Texas sports. To wit, I talked to Steve Ross about this recently and he noted that basketball revenue has been basically flat the last few years regardless of on-court results. There wasn't a massive dip in revenue during the 11-win season which might have sent a bigger message to the AD 15-20 years ago. The fact that more and more seats/suites are being bought by businesses looking to entertain clients than fans and it tends to stabilize the revenue stream. This is a bigger thing in the pro ranks, but with the lack of top-level pro teams in Austin it probably plays a bigger role than one might otherwise expect. I'm not saying it's right or wrong that things are this way, it's just the modern-day sports revenue situation in more and more sports. MLB seems like another place where this manifests, where a team like Tampa Bay can make money despite having such fan apathy nobody has even updated their Wikipedia history page to include the last 5 seasons. Football is probably the outlier to this situation, though if ESPN & CBS continue to pour money into those deals it might fall in line one day as well.

Maligi started with Tech 5 months ago.

There was a point Shaka was interested in bringing Ulric Maligi on board and compliance said no, too many red flags. He was on the A&M staff with Stansbury, if that paints a picture.

It would be thematically appropriate for Shaka to lead this team to a second-straight NIT title, then hug his players goodbye and board the 2 train to take over Fordham in the A10.

Normally that question is ridiculous, but again, this guy bought out his own deal in Vegas to move to Lubbock. He's clearly not like most people.

Archie Miller's contract is like Shaka's, Texas isn't paying off the remainder of two guaranteed deals. Greg Marshall is still getting made whole by literal billionaires in the Koch brothers, so good luck outbidding that.

we're not going to do that competing for the Final Four in basketball isn't even a nice-to-have around here. it's certainly not a priority or a must-have. I think a lot of you have bought into a real myth about Texas athletics, because of the "we're the Joneses" bullshit of the decade of the 2000s. Keeping up with the Joneses is just an idiomatic way of saying keeping up appearances. The Joneses in this idiom aren't the smartest or happiest family on the block (at least not intrinsically so). They're not winners. They just have the nicest looking stuff. The myth is that "we're the Joneses" has anything at all to do with winning. It doesn't. It (maybe) has some (casual) correlation, because winning makes more money than losing, but ultimately Being Texas is about appearances. We look like an athletic program that should win a lot, and we make a lot of money doing what we do, which is being the college sports equivalent of the stereotypical Obtuse White Guy in a TV commercial, or maybe a Billy Zabka character from an 80s movie. The only way-- and I mean this in literal terms, I mean there is never going to be a hypothetical BMD who decides he wants to see us win a basketball national title and money-whips Tony Bennett to come here, and Chris Beard is not going to tearfully declare he's Coming Home To Restore Texas Basketball, and none of the other fanciful What Ifs are going to happen -- the only way Texas will ever have a coach on the level of Billy Donovan is if we hire him as an up-and-comer from some Dollar Store program and then, like Rick Barnes, he decides to be a lifer here because you can coast for fucking years here once you're embedded. Before I entertain the possibility of Beard at Texas, somebody is going to have to answer at least three questions: 1) Why would he leave a school/fanbase who treats him like a god, shows up for his games better than Texas fans do, will pay him as much as Texas will, will allow him to hire assistants that will never pass Texas compliance, and is building him everything he asks for? This is probably like 4 questions in one, but whatever. 2) Why would he leave a town with which he has more history (a decade as an assistant coach + his current run) than Austin (undergrad and GA years, the last of which happened a literal quarter-century ago)? 3) Why would he leave a place where he bought out his own UNLV contract to come to after 19 days?! This is something I have never before heard of a head coach doing. Until somebody can sufficiently explain those three points - plus who is paying for his assistants' buyouts on top of that $6m - I'm not considering him available. The dude legit loves that weird-ass West Texas town and they love him.

It's almost as if having a lawyer playing adult fantasy camp AD instead of someone with experience running a nine-figure operation has adverse consequences. I don't dislike Perrin and it's not really his fault Texas took forever to find his replacement, but there are repercussions that last beyond his tenure.

It's not a buyout per se, it's paying off the remainder of a fully-guaranteed contract. He's owed about $10.5m at the end of this season, so say about $12.2m right now. 19/20 3,300,000 20/21 3,400,000 21/22 3,500,000 22/23 3,600,000

Aye, this is more or less what I'm saying. This, combined with the significantly bigger revenue swings that come from football fan disengagement/apathy relative to basketball, are why Tom Herman failing or succeeding has some impact on the math behind Shaka's job security. CDC is running a $100m+ business and football gets the lion's share of his attention because it produces the lion's share of the money; if he thinks he's going to have to replace Herman soon, it's going to cut into the cash available to do a litany of other things up to and including replacing Shaka. Maybe he doesn't think he will and this point is moot, it's just an angle I've been thinking about.

This is all a game of telephone with secondhand sources so anything is possible, but what I heard prior to the NIT run is that CDC wasn't able to get that kind of scratch raised to let go of Shaka. They had such a hard time raising money for a new arena that they had to enter into this weird partnership to get the new arena built, because Texas boosters do not give enough of a damn about basketball to fund high-dollar enterprises. This is also why CDC was open to Shaka kicking the tires on other gigs back in March, because it would save Texas a bundle if he went to Wake Forest or wherever. CDC hasn't found a booster base with the appetite to fund $10m in guaranteed money (plus whatever it takes to hire the new coach) and it has given Shaka more runway to try to fix things. Yes, Texas is rich, but they only really want to use that money on football. They probably would keep the Drum around for another decade if the medical school hadn't claimed that land in the first place. Maybe the other poster is correct - lord knows I do not have a direct line to CDC or the biggest donors - but it contradicts what I heard at the time. The irony here is it's this sort of relative donor apathy that makes the Texas job so attractive to a lot of coaches. They know they can have a down year or two and not get shot out of a cannon, unlike Kansas/Kentucky/etc.

100% agree, was just giving a name that would get Texas fans excited.

Payments over a certain dollar amount (I don't recall the exact number, but suffice it to say these two moves & the subsequent hires would easily qualify) have to get approved by the regents, so dipping into the red has to be approved by quite a few people. Historically speaking, buyouts of this scale have been subsidized by donors writing checks so before they even get to the regents CDC is going to have to do some serious fundraising. The donors are less likely to sign a check if they don't have what they think is a home run hire on deck, so there's also that variable to add into this. In short, for CDC to pull off wiping both of them out he's going to have to pre-stage a pair of home run replacements (let's be generous and say he lands Tony Bennett & Matt Campbell) that would get the donors excited enough to write seven-figure checks which will then be presented to the regents as proof this is the right move. Whether you think CDC is capable of pulling this off twice in the span of 7-8 months probably informs how likely you think it is this could happen. It would be quite a feat if he could manage it.

If we're splitting hairs - and boy, do I love to split hairs - it's not a buyout. It's the remaining guaranteed money on his contract. I'm not really planning on weighing in on whether or not Shaka will make it another year for 3 more months (unless the wheels really fall off or the team gets significantly better) but one factor that interests me in this discussion: Tom Herman. If CDC is contemplating the possibility he might have to replace Herman ~11 months from now, does he think he can raise the money to pay off both Shaka & Herman's deals as well as the costs of hiring their replacements? If not, which one does he think will be easier to fund/justify? Shaka might seem like the easy answer as it's less expensive, but basketball revenue is remarkably stable over the years regardless of performance so keeping Shaka could cost the athletics program less money than the lost revenue from keeping an underperforming football coach. Combine that with the generally greater donor appetite for raising money to hire/fire football coaches and Shaka might skate this year even if they end up in the NIT again. Put another way: Texas might be in a similar situation as Texas A&M was with Billy Kennedy & their football coaching instability. I would love to know how CDC is looking at this cost/benefit situation because his fundraising skills may be put to a serious test in 2020. I don't have an answer to this hypothetical, it's just something I've been ruminating on recently...well, since about 3 PM on Saturday.

There are a few things I've been digging into as it relates to the threes to tease out what the most important aspects are of those shots. The first and most important thing to me is that the threes are spot-up threes rather than off the dribble, because college shooters are almost invariably worse at the off the dribble variety; Texas has been up & down in this regard, but I'm seeing less of the off the dribble threes than early in the season so that's an improvement. The second is that as many of the half-court threes as possible need to be generated off of paint touches. This offense works best when they're moving the ball from side to side quickly to create cracks in the defense for Coleman/Ramey (to a lesser extent Andrew Jones) to drive into the paint and either get to the rim or kick out to the open shooter. Open spot up threes off paint touches > spot up threes >>> off the dribble threes One of the other things I'm focusing on is the average of Coleman + Ramey + A Jones + Febres because they take 80% of the threes and are going to make or break the offensive output with their decisions. The other three-point shooters aren't irrelevant, but matter much less than these four. As a group they're shooting 35.4%, which is decent but not where it needs to be. As a group they need to be averaging 37%+ for this offense to really hit its ceiling. Coleman 18-36 (50%) A Jones 19-52 (36.5%) Febres 23-68 (33.8%) Ramey 9-39 (23.1%) Ramey is dragging things down for the group, though he's hit 40% through the last three games (6-16) so he's hopefully showing signs of getting back to who he was last year. Febres needs to be higher since his role is mostly "make threes". Of his 52 possessions considered 'spot-up' shots in Synergy, 8 are classified as off the dribble but I think it's classifying the ones where he pump fakes and takes one dribble to the side before shooting so I'm not too worried about that. (The dribble threes are a bigger issue with Ramey & Jones.) We're also due for a Coleman regression to the mean as he's not going to keep hitting at a 50% clip all year. The wildcard is Andrew Jones; at 36.5% he's more than serviceable, but he was also hitting 46% of his threes before the cancer so we know he's theoretically capable of hitting at a higher rate. If he does, he could counteract Coleman's inevitable regression. If he doesn't, this could continue to be a group that is marginally below where it needs to be. None of this is meant as a refutation of your larger point about the offense not being where it needs to be, just been digging into this a bit and thought I'd add some bits to it.