Longhorns focused on the here and now
DES MOINES, Iowa — The funny thing about the past is that if you’re young enough, it does not exist. A child cannot be scarred by memories he doesn’t have. A team cannot be haunted by ghosts it’s never seen.
So when a Texas team full of relative newcomers stumbled into the moment of peril that every long-suffering fan saw coming Saturday at Wells Fargo Arena, the Longhorns were not bound by history, because they were oblivious to it.
Dylan Disu, doing his unwitting impersonation of Hakeem Olajuwon with a floater, didn’t know that this was when everything was supposed to fall apart. Timmy Allen and Marcus Carr had no idea this was when Texas was destined to blow another opportunity. Sir’Jabari Rice, blissfully unfamiliar with a decade and a half of NCAA Tournament failure, carried no monkey on his back.
“It’s a whole new generation,” Texas sophomore Tyrese Hunter said. “Fifteen years is a long time ago.”
And with one coolheaded, misery-defying finish, all of the Longhorns disappointments during those 15 years might as well have up and vanished. Led by a coach who exemplified their combination of spirit and calm, and a revelation of a performance by Disu, the Longhorns beat Penn State 71-66 to advance to their first Sweet 16 since 2008.
“Whatever happened in the past,” said Allen, who like the Longhorns’ other top five scorers transferred from another program within the past two years, “is the past.”
And this time, Texas made sure to leave it there. They left the past in the past thanks to Disu, whose unlikely late-season surge culminated with a career-high 28 points, including three baskets in a row down the stretch to erase a 58-55 deficit and give the Longhorns the lead for good.
They left the past in the past thanks to Rodney Terry, the longtime assistant who inherited what should have been a disaster when former Texas coach was suspended and subsequently fired after a domestic violence arrest in December. For three months he’s had a plan, and when his players faced the part of Saturday’s game when so many other Texas teams have melted down in previous NCAA tournaments, they acted like they knew exactly what to do.
“Through all these experiences, there’s a calm, there’s a poise about this team,” Terry said. “These guys were stone-faced.”
They were stone-faced, that is, until it came time for them to jump up and down and hug the coach to which they’ve proclaimed their undying devotion, and the man who should have had the “interim” removed from his job title before the team plane landed back in Austin.
“How could you not love RT?” asked Disu.
“RT is the man,” Rice said. “I thank God, but I thank him, mostly.”
How did Terry do it? Back in December, he started by “not trying to reinvent the wheel,” as Longhorns assistant Chris Ogden put it. Terry kept a system in place, but he tweaked it, little by little, and before the Longhorns knew it, his personality was theirs.
“He’s one of the best humans in the basketball world, and I mean this,” Ogden said. “He’s just a genuinely good person.”
And all of that is fine and good, but the Longhorns wouldn’t have won Saturday if Terry didn’t know how to coach, too. The Nittany Lions ground things down to a possession-by-possession game, which contradicts how Texas has played lately, but Terry was ready for it.
And at the end of the night, the Longhorns somehow prevailed in a game in which they had no fastbreak points and made only one measly 3-pointer. How on earth does that happen in a basketball game in 2023, when winning without making 3sis like living without a cellphone?
“It’s unthinkable,” said former Longhorns guard Lance Blanks, a close friend of Terry’s who watched Saturday’s game from the front row. “But this whole season has been unthinkable.”
Not to Terry, though. He never made excuses for a staff navigating its way through a midseason coaching change, and he never indulged questions about why he hadn’t been named Texas’ permanent head coach, and Saturday night he kept downplaying
the idea that the Longhorns’ breakthrough was about him.
But he couldn’t help flexing, even if just a little bit. For nine years in the 2000s, he was the Longhorns’ lead assistant during an era when the Longhorns enjoyed regular March success. After spending some time as a head coach at Fresno State and UNLV, he returned before last season. So when people tried to treat a second-round victory as a big deal Saturday, he grinned.
“I’m used to Sweet 16s at Texas, to be honest with you,” Terry said. “I’m not bragging, but when I was here before, we were in the Sweet 16 quite a bit.”
So he had some history in mind Sunday. And even if his players considered almost nothing about the past before the last year or so?
They knew one thing for sure.
“Everything that happened to this point,” Allen said, “has put us right where we need to be.”
The ghosts never had a chance.