Mental makeover is Smart’s biggest task
Shaka Smart has a bigger budget than he did five years ago.
He coaches in a better conference, at a school with a higher profile, with players who received more scholarship offers.
But he’s just as good at being an underdog.
As he prepares to face Kansas for the first time since the game that made him a star, Smart realizes the stakes aren’t as high as when his Virginia Commonwealth team stunned the Jayhawks at the Alamodome to advance to the 2011 Final Four. But more and more these days, Texas (12-6, 4-2 Big 12) is embracing the Rams’ mentality from that season.
For Smart and his Longhorns, who visit Allen Fieldhouse on Saturday, it didn’t
happen right away. He arrived at UT and found locker-room issues similar to the ones discovered by his friend Charlie Strong. The phrase, “We’re Texas,” sounded too much like an entitlement and not enough like an aspiration.
When his team sleepwalked through some ugly losses, it looked like he might not be able to recreate that old VCU hunger. But then the Longhorns played over their heads in a breakthrough upset of North Carolina. They did it again against Iowa State, and Wednesday they beat another ranked team, this time on the road at sixthranked West Virginia.
Underdog mindset
One of the key performers in that game was Kendal Yancy, a role player who took it to heart when Smart told him to “be nasty.” And when Yancy was asked how many giants UT needs to slay before people consider the Longhorns a legitimate power, too, he gave an answer Smart’s old teams would have loved.
“I don’t really know, and I don’t really care,” Yancy said. “But when we have that mindset like an underdog, we’re a tough team to beat.”
More than any strategic adjustment or style of play, a mental makeover has been Smart’s biggest priority since he took over at UT. In November, he publicly questioned whether his team was “naturally confident,” and this month he lamented how his players had learned it was acceptable to “get bummed out.”
For a man who made his mark by instilling his teams with attitude, that was unacceptable. Although VCU’s memorable run through the 2011 NCAA Tournament received plenty of national attention for the way the Rams shot 3-pointers and applied full-court pressure, Smart said that was far less important than the way his players believed in themselves.
Rolling without Ridley
The day he was hired at UT, he recalled the details of VCU’s momentous victory over the Jayhawks and vowed the same kind of achievement would be possible in Austin.
“On that day, we had a competitiveness, a belief, and a connectivity that allowed us to beat them and reach the Final Four,” Smart said. “To me, as a coach, what you’re constantly trying to do is replicate that, and that’s what we’re going to work towards here.”
The Horns have worked toward it even after an injury to their best player — center Cameron Ridley — made them look doomed. With Ridley out indefinitely due to a broken foot, Smart had to change almost everything about what the team does at both ends of the floor. And somehow, UT has won four of its last five games without him. It won’t get easier. Saturday’s game at No. 3 Kansas (15-3, 4-2) is the first of nine remaining games against teams listed in the top 30 of the Ratings Percentage Index. To make the NCAA Tournament, the Longhorns probably will need to win a couple of those.
But the way forward Shaquille Cleare sees it, the fact they will be expected to lose most of them isn’t a bad thing.
“They’re under more pressure than we are,” Cleare said of Kansas. “We can just go hoop.”
Just like VCU did.