dude. stop. this is why the word disingenuous keeps getting used. this pro-RT crowd incessantly boils down what beard did here to “he won one tournament game”.’ stop it. just stop. in one breath you use UT Basketball’s mediocre history to praise RT for “leading” us to the elite 8 (when we all know good and damn well that it was beard’s players who led that run), only then you turn around and denigrate the job that beard did to end our 8 year stretch without a tourney win, suddenly ignoring said mediocre history and what a huge achievement that was for this program.
beard took over a roster that couldn’t even fill out a starting lineup, signed the no.1 transfer class in america, finished behind only KU, BU, and TTU in the toughest league in america, and then ended our nearly decade long tourney drought, again, with a team that had no size, no athleticism, no shooting, and no nba talent. he then brought in tyrese hunter and jabari rice + a good recruiting class and by december of his second year he had Texas at no.1 in kenpom for the first time in school history, and nationally regarded as one of the 3-4 favorites to win the ncaa tourney.
speaking of school history, chris beard took over a program where fan interest had been killed by shaka smart’s unique blend of top 5 national recruiting + inept teams + horrible results, and all Beard did was create the highest level of fan interest and best game day atmosphere in the history of the program, essentially overnight. chris beard was doing at Texas what he had done everywhere else he’s ever been: make his program elite overnight by instilling his ferocious yet consistent style of play and coaching up his players to be able to execute it.
every single thing that rodney terry has “accomplished” at Texas he did so with beard’s players who were already well drilled 20-somethings with tons of experience and prior elite coaching. when RT has been in charge on his own he has produced one of the worst defenses in modern Texas history, THE worst three point defense we’ve ever had, a completely volatile and mercurial product on the floor, he’s taken a wildly consistent team and made them wildly inconsistent, and he’s taken all of the basic tenets of wining which his predecessors rick barnes and chris beard tried to instill in him and he’s thrown them out the window. bad shots, low IQ players, crappy defense; its as if he learned nothing from them.
IQ is down, consistency is down, wins are down, defense is WAY down, fan interest is down, and all of this has happened despite RT taking over a situation that was 1,000x more set up for success than the situation that Beard had taken over just 18 months prior. and you guys want to come in here and seriously claim that RT has already done more here than Beard ever did. what a load of horse shit.
these incessant arguments saying that RT has accomplished more than beard did here are one of two things: a downright lie that you’re trying to perpetrate because you’re butthurt about Beard, or a scathing indictment on your ability to understand what you are watching when you watch Texas basketball. either way, everyone here will be better off when you people stop it with this completely disingenuous nonsense.