More March magic for UT?
Terry believes these Longhorns can be as good as last year’s Elite Eight team
AUSTIN — Every spring for 15 years, Texas basketball coaches proved that the months of November through February don’t matter much. No result before March gets remembered for long. No compiled body of work, no matter how extensive, guarantees anything when a championship is on the line.
And now that the job is Rodney Terry’s?
The Longhorns are counting on him to prove the same thing.
Now that we’ve arrived at what Terry calls “the best time of the year,” he has the chance to flip the story of a season the same way so many of his predecessors used to do, except in reverse.
For far too long, Rick Barnes and Shaka Smart let March wash away the goodwill.
This month, Terry can let it wash away the doubt.
And get one thing straight here: In his first full season as the Longhorns’ head coach, his team might have underwhelmed at times, and it might have taken too long to find its groove. But that doesn’t mean Terry is lowering his own bar for what he expects this postseason.
“We’ve got postseason experience, and we’ve got guys who understand this time of year,” Terry said after the Longhorns’ 81-65 victory over Oklahoma State at the Moody Center on Saturday. “We have a really high ceiling.”
It’s easy to forget that this is why Terry got the
job in the first place. He didn’t earn it last January and February, when he took over for the fired Chris Beard and kept the Longhorns in the Top 25 all season. Plenty of UT coaches had done that over the past decade and a half.
What set him apart was what he did at the end, when the Longhorns won the Big 12 tournament, finally advanced past the first weekend of the NCAA tournament, and then made their first Elite Eight since 2008.
Yes, that team was different than this one, in several ways. But that doesn’t mean the outcome for these 19-10 (8-8 in the Big 12) Longhorns has to be worse.
“We can be as good as last year’s team,” Terry said.
The problem until now is that these Longhorns have been playing catch-up ever since mid-January, when they bottomed out with a home embarrassment against Central Florida. Not only did they lose to one of the worst teams in the Big 12 that afternoon, Terry made it worse when he scolded opposing players about a “horns down” gesture in the postgame handshake line.
But if that silly moment suggested UT was about to unravel, the next few weeks proved otherwise. The Longhorns have been far from perfect since then, but they’ve won more than they lost. And they picked up enough NCAA tournament resume highlights (including victories at Oklahoma, TCU and Texas Tech and at home against Baylor) to have an at-large bid all but secured heading into the final week of the regular season.
“Could we have been better and won a game like Central Florida?” Terry said. “Yes, but we were still trying to find our way.”
And as they rediscover it?
One thing the Longhorns still having going for them is a proven March difference-maker in Dylan Disu, who earned most outstanding player at last year’s Big 12 tournament, and then then averaged 22.5 points and 10 rebounds in the Longhorns’ first two NCAA tournament games. If he hadn’t injured his foot, UT might have made it to the Final Four. When he elected to return for his senior season, All-America honors didn’t seem unthinkable.
Due to his lingering injury and an up-anddown start, that didn’t happen. But his combination of size and feel for the game make him a tough matchup for anybody, and a two-minute stretch midway through the first half on Saturday showed all the ways Disu might be able to spark another March run.
At the 11:08 mark, he overpowered his defender on a quick drive down the lane, converting a layup and a free throw for a three-point play. At the other end of the floor, he swatted away a running shot attempt by OSU’s Javon Small, chased down the rebound himself, then brought the ball up the floor and fired a perfect pass to Kadin Shedrick for a dunk.
On UT’s next possession, Disu scored on a high, soft floater. He finished with 17 points to go with five rebounds and five assists, and his 3pointer with 9:17 remaining in the second half capped a game-icing 14-0 UT run.
When asked later if there’s something about this time of year that brings his best out of him, Disu demurred, saying it has more to do with his health than anything.
But he made an admission that rang true.
“I like March as much as anybody,” Disu said.
That’s in part because March can change everything.
In the latter half of his UT tenure, Barnes understood that all too well. So did Smart.
And if Terry can be reminded of that again?
Instead of cursing a month, like they did for so long, the Longhorns can be thankful for it.