Lack of entitlement could power UT to Sweet 16, beyond
DES MOINES, Iowa — Marcus Carr never dreamed about this. As a kid he was neither bold nor presumptuous enough to think he’d ever lead Texas to greatness, because he couldn’t dare imagine being at a school like Texas in the first place.
“An unreachable goal,” Carr said while sitting in a locker room at Wells Fargo Arena on Wednesday, and all around him sat teammates who understood what he meant. The first time Sir’Jabari Rice walked into the Longhorns’ extravagant weight room, with its ridiculous array of STIM machines and high-tech gear, he thought it had to be a joke.
College kids actually live like this?
At Texas they do, even though it hasn’t guaranteed much. Fourteen years in a row, the Longhorns men’s basketball team has failed to make it past the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament. Fourteen years in a row, that failure has boiled down in one way or another to the hubris — and some might say entitlement — of a two-word school slogan famously uttered by Walter Cronkite.
“We’re Texas,” the iconic TV ads proclaimed.
But led by a plucky interim head coach and a hardscrabble band of cast-offs and up-andcomers who wound up at UT only after beginning their careers elsewhere, that motto has changed, if only by a punctuation mark.
If the team that opens the NCAA tournament against Colgate on Thursday has a vibe, it’s, “We’re Texas?”
That attitude suits these Longhorns well.
And it might just get them to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 2008.
They have business to take care of first, not only as a No. 2 seed in the Midwest Region against Colgate at Wells Fargo Arena in the first round, but also in a potential showdown with old rival Texas A&M on Saturday. The No. 7 Aggies, who play Penn State Thursday, look like one of the most underseeded teams in the tournament.
But if the Longhorns come up short of the second weekend this time, it probably won’t be for the reasons that have become all too familiar over the past decade and a half. Interim coach Rodney Terry’s team isn’t filled with elite recruits who expect good things to happen just because they’re blue-chippers and just because UT is UT.
As senior forward Brock Cunningham said, there have been times in the past when UT squads “were called ‘country club’ and lackadaisical.”
“We’re far from that,” said Rice, who spent five years at New Mexico State before transferring to UT and becoming one of the best sixth men in the country. “We have no entitlement. We’d actually rather not have fancy stuff around here, to be honest.”
Even if playing for the Longhorns has made some past teams too comfortable, not many of the current guys have been around long enough to get used to it. All six of UT’s top scorers began their college careers elsewhere, and all of them have reasons for feeling like they have something to prove.
Carr played at Pittsburgh and Minnesota. Timmy Allen transferred from Utah, Dylan Disu from Vanderbilt, Tyrese Hunter from Iowa State and Christian Bishop from Creighton.
On one hand, they’re all talented and experienced and have made the Longhorns a formidable group with Final Four potential. On the other, most of them were lightly recruited by UT’s normally standards, which gives even a team that spent much of this season in the Top 10 a bit of an underdog feel.
“We have some of those guys who’ve had that path,” said Terry, who might be coaching with his own proverbial shoulder chip. Despite the magnificent job he’s done since taking over for ousted coach Chris Beard in December, he still might be out of a gig if the Longhorns don’t win at least a couple of games in the tournament.
Terry’s not complaining about that. In a way, it feeds into the dynamic of a hard-nosed team playing without the program’s usual “We’re Texas” identity.
“Nobody is going to give anything to us because we’re Texas,” Disu said. “This team understands that.”
Said Allen: “There’s no ego among us.”
Some of the Longhorns never have had a chance to develop one. And now, Rice said, they don’t intend on letting the expectations go to their heads.
“It puts us in a position to choose,” Rice said. “Do you try to live up to the fame and the hype and whatever, or just be who we are?”
If they do the latter and somehow end 14 years of failures in the process?
“We’re Texas” might take on a different connotation after all.