Kirk Bohls (I know) says he is hearing a change is likely to be made.
AUSTIN — My eyes still hurt.
I don’t know if you watched the eyesore that was the Texas men’s basketball game against South Carolina on Saturday night, but I did. And I still have a migraine.
A week after knocking off No. 15 Kentucky to snap a three-game losing streak, the Longhorns put out a woeful performance, arguably the worst of the season although there are a lot of candidates, and became the first SEC team to lose to the dreadful Gamecocks.
It’s painful to review but Texas trailed by 18 at the half, and it got worse from there before the Longhorns fell 84-69 to drop to 16-11 overall and back on the NCAA Tournament bubble. They are only 7-11 in quad 1 and 2 victories and have no eye-popping non-conference wins to tout.
With the road loss, Texas’ chances of making the NCAA tourney slip drastically from 67% to 52%, according to the ESPN Analytics model. The Longhorns are only 3-9 against top-50 teams, Joe Lunardi hasn’t updated his projections since Friday’s field, which included Texas unbelievably as a 9 seed. CBSsports.com, however, dropped Texas from its bracket as Jerry Palm listed it as the very first team out, its 38 NET ranking notwithstanding.
Not only that, it ratchets up the scrutiny and pressure on Rodney Terry to deliver in a big way down the stretch to save his job.
After talking to some big-time Texas figures, I’d say at the moment Terry is in a must-win situation and probably has to win at least two games in the SEC, get into the NCAA field of 68 and maybe win two games there.
That’s how dire it’s looking for RT.
Texas squandered its good position with a hideous effort against South Carolina, in which freshman Tre Johnson was the lone standout with 29 points, 20 of them in the second half. No other Longhorns had more than 9 points.
Chris Del Conte never weighs in on the future of a Longhorn coach during the season, but he is always super aggressive about getting his ducks in a row to react quickly once the final buzzer has sounded.
It won’t be unrealistic if Texas bottoms out and the Texas athletic director fires Terry and hires his replacement all in a weekend’s time.
Money will be a huge factor in this decision because Terry has three years left on his contract and would be owed $6 million as a buyout. Obviously, Texas would have to consider high-level candidates whose contracts would also contain a big buyout that it would have to pay off. Throw in the existing staff contracts, and the school might have to pony up $20 million or more to pull this off, which is no small sum.
Terry was never Del Conte’s preferred coach, but Chris Beard’s top assistant earned the promotion to head coach by stabilizing the season when Beard was fired at midseason and taking an overachieving Longhorn team to the Elite Eight and the brink of a Final Four.
Texas would feel some public backlash for firing an African-American basketball coach — only the second in school history — and making a change after he had had just two full seasons. But Del Conte will have to weigh public opinion, gauge how much slippage the program has undergone and figure out how big he goes in a coaching search.
As of the end of February, I’d say the decision is trending toward a new coach for 2025-26.