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Texas basketball '21-'22: Welcome Chris Beard


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Yep, just 8 more weeks from Tuesday. Which is a coincidence, because with a bowl game...8 games is all we'll win in football this year.  

I'm so glad we have competent coaches in our other sports because we are just bound and determined for mediocrity in football.  

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I've been more hyped for the upcoming Basketball season than Football and the Arky game wasn't even a surprise to this guy. Sark turned out to be what I expected, the same 46-35 failure that flamed out at not one, but two power five schools. Beard has a proven track record and assembled a cast capable of reaching the final four and beyond. I'm counting down the days to that Zaga match up and anticipating it more than the OU game in football....fight me idgaf.

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2 hours ago, Pancho said:

😳
 

 

1 hour ago, maninblack said:

What fucking year was that pic taken in?

As diverse a group as ever. 

Are they still in that monstrous house that they built in the late ’80s that spurred them to go with massive pledge classes so that they could pay their home loans?

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1 hour ago, Napoleon said:

 

As diverse a group as ever. 

Are they still in that monstrous house that they built in the late ’80s that spurred them to go with massive pledge classes so that they could pay their home loans?

I lived in a complex across the street from it on 25th for 2.5 years, into 2000. 

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Erwin Center sendoff on Big Monday versus defending National Champion.  Could be worse ways to go out, I suppose.  

No need to worry about that NYD game with WVU conflicting with a major bowl game appearance this year.  

And one last chance for a bang-bang...home NCO baseball game at the Disch, followed by TTU hoops at the Drum on 2/19 (or vice-versa) 

Not gonna miss that shithole venue, but lots of fun memories.  

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14 minutes ago, Pancho said:

 

god i love this. bitchass Shaka Smart got to Marquette and said, "i'm glad to be at a place that cares about basketball where the fans will show up". well guess what buddy?! the fans weren't the problem! we have more than a million people living within a 30-40 minute drive of our 16,000 seat arena. if the product isn't garbage, they will come. the FEC is going to be electric this year. 🤘🏼 

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6 minutes ago, TrashMaster G said:

The Beard-Moody Center 1-2 punch has everything to do with it.

This.  And a close third punch is there's talk of trying to win several contests of men's collegiate basketball.  

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On 9/24/2021 at 12:31 PM, Pancho said:

 

I decided to buy two basketball season tickets for the first time versus adding two football more football season tickets in the SEZ. After market tickets for one or two games made that decision fairly easy. Logged in before noon yesterday to pick my two seats and there were no seats available free throw line to free throw line in the lower, mezzanine and upper levels. Luckily I got two behind visitors bench, but I’m certain they were the last two together facing the court in lower level. 10-12K season ticket holders wouldn’t shock me. The Beard train dream season is for real. 

 

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Man, Rick comes here on 1/29 and 3 days later, Coach Beard goes back to Lubbock.  I haven't seen a 72 hour stretch that awkward since Briscoe Cain and I hit up every strip club in Atlanta.  

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11 hours ago, Okcool said:

I decided to buy two basketball season tickets for the first time versus adding two football more football season tickets in the SEZ. After market tickets for one or two games made that decision fairly easy. Logged in before noon yesterday to pick my two seats and there were no seats available free throw line to free throw line in the lower, mezzanine and upper levels. Luckily I got two behind visitors bench, but I’m certain they were the last two together facing the court in lower level. 10-12K season ticket holders wouldn’t shock me. The Beard train dream season is for real. 

 

WTF? I haven’t heard shit about selecting seats and I put a deposit down. When did you get notice?

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21 hours ago, Okcool said:

I decided to buy two basketball season tickets for the first time versus adding two football more football season tickets in the SEZ. After market tickets for one or two games made that decision fairly easy. Logged in before noon yesterday to pick my two seats and there were no seats available free throw line to free throw line in the lower, mezzanine and upper levels. Luckily I got two behind visitors bench, but I’m certain they were the last two together facing the court in lower level. 10-12K season ticket holders wouldn’t shock me. The Beard train dream season is for real. 

 

Man I'm glad you posted this. I emailed them this morning and they said I should've received 3 emails by now - I hadn't received any and I checked my spam filter. Ended up buying 3 in the first row of the upper deck, nobody behind me other than handicap seats which are raised. Pretty lucky to get these.

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The Athletic - "After striking gold with transfers, Texas and Chris Beard hope to turn that into rings"

Spoiler

Don’t look now, but the Texas Longhorns have been feuding. The conflict broke out during what had been a routine team meal at the team’s practice facility in early July. Suddenly, without warning, coach Chris Beard announced, “We’re going to play the Feud,” at which point assistant coach Jerrance Howard emerged wearing a suit, a fake mustache and a wide smile. Howard had been assigned to play the part of Steve Harvey, and as he walked to a podium, the familiar theme song from “Family Feud” boomed on the loudspeakers.

Beard spared no effort in bringing the iconic game show to life. The group was divided into two families, and as Howard called out the questions, they appeared above him on a large flat screen. The topics were all basketball related and had been prepared in advance by a couple of graduate assistants. The players relished the experience, but they were serious about it, too. “It was real competitive,” Howard says. “That’s our culture around here. There’s always going to be a winner and a loser.”

It is very on-brand for Beard to take the concept of “divide and conquer” to such extremes, but given all the new faces in Austin this season, he needs to do everything he can to establish familial bonds. He has set up bowling nights, movie nights, pickleball tournaments and all kinds of social gatherings. He even surprised a couple of transfers with an impromptu graduation ceremony at a local Four Seasons hotel. The players were handed caps and gowns, walked to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” and accepted their diplomas while their new teammates cheered them on. When preseason workouts are done, Beard will sometimes stand in front of the team and quiz guys on whether they know what a teammate’s father does for a living, how many siblings he has and what his hobbies are. “Some people think relationships happen naturally, but I think you’ve got to work at them,” Beard says. “Every day we spend a couple of minutes to make the point to the guys that the thing we’re fighting more than anything is time. We’re about to compete against teams that have been together a lot longer than us.”

Forging chemistry can be delicate and unpredictable, but if the Longhorns are able to get on the same page, they could write a heck of a story this season. All the pieces to win an NCAA championship are there, beginning with Beard, who was hired on April 1 to replace Shaka Smart after Smart left for Marquette. Beard, who graduated from Texas in 1995 and worked for four seasons there as a graduate assistant under Tom Penders, did an amazing job during his five years at Texas Tech, taking a program with scant basketball tradition to the 2019 NCAA championship game, where it lost in overtime in Virginia, as well as the Elite Eight the year before.

Texas made a huge splash when it lured Beard home with a seven-year, $45 million contract, but that was nothing compared to the tidal wave of transfers that followed. In rapid-fire fashion, Beard signed seven — count ’em, seven — players out of the portal, a haul which included two Power 6 all-conference players in Marcus Carr (who came from Minnesota) and Timmy Allen (Utah), as well as a key cog on a Sweet 16 team (Creighton’s Christian Bishop) and one of the best mid-major players in America (UMass’ Tre Mitchell). Texas also returns four players from last season, including the starting backcourt, Andrew Jones and Courtney Ramey, who are both seniors.

All of this has set the table for a season of great expectations. The Longhorns have been ranked in the top five of the AP’s preseason Top 25 just three times in their history, but it’s a safe bet that’s where they’ll be when the poll is released Oct. 18. “It’s been crazy, but it’s also exciting,” Jones says. “I love my new teammates, I love the coaching staff. It’s a great group of people. It wasn’t like it was awkward when everybody got here. Guys were excited to meet each other and excited to get the season going.”

That will be the theme for Texas as the 2021-22 season gets underway. Everything is new, yet it already feels familiar. Beard is tickled for the chance to bring some basketball glory to his football-mad alma mater, but he is not looking at this as a sentimental journey. “I understand the question because I did go to school here, so of course there are some emotions and pride,” he says. “But more important to me is that this is the next opportunity. This is a new challenge for all of us, and I think we’re ready for it.”

The big question
There aren’t many rosters around the country that have this much talent. There also aren’t many with this number of new faces. The big question is, can this team develop championship-level chemistry in time to reach its potential? Or will this family feud its way to a disappointing finish?

It helps that Beard has had so much success coaching transfers in the past, not only at Texas Tech but also during his one season at Little Rock. He also has been a head coach at two junior colleges, a Division II school and a Division III school, and he even spent one year coaching an ABA team. He is used to assembling rosters on the fly.

In the coming weeks, Beard will take the team on one of his patented bonding retreats. He has been doing this almost as long as he has been in coaching, having been inspired many years ago after reading the best selling book “The Junction Boys,” which chronicles the hellish summer training camps Bear Bryant staged when he was the football coach at Texas A&M. One time when Beard was at Division II Angelo State, he took his players to a location so remote that there was no cell service or running water. They had to bring a portable shower to wash off. This year’s retreat will take place in the next couple of weeks, and while it won’t be quite so rustic, Beard hopes it will forge the type of chemistry that begets basketball synchronicity.

Still, transfers are notorious for pursuing individual agendas. Beard gently points out that there are only two players on this team who have won an NCAA Tournament game. That should make everyone especially motivated to play deep into March. “There’s a lot of urgency here,” Jones says. “We’re on edge every day. We have to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time. You have to put in the work each and every day, or the guys who are here will take that spot.”

Roster analysis
Guards: For the last four years, the point guard position at Texas has been superbly manned by Matt Coleman, who started every one of his 128 games. Coleman’s graduation leaves an opening, and while that will be filled primarily by Marcus Carr, there are several others who are capable of piloting the offense.

One of those is Courtney Ramey, a 6-foot-3 senior from St. Louis who has been a three-year starter and played point guard on 17 percent of Texas’ possessions last season, according to KenPom.com. Ramey is coming off a terrific offensive season, averaging 12.2 points on 41.4 percent 3-point shooting and 83.1 percent foul shooting — all career highs. However, he also averaged a career-high 2.5 turnovers to 3.9 assists, so he will need to take better care of the ball. He should also be plenty motivated, given that his season ended with an atrocious performance in Texas’ 53-52 first-round NCAA Tournament loss to Abilene Christian. Ramey shot 1-of-7 from the floor (0-of-3 from 3), did not attempt a free throw and had four turnovers.

Ramey will need to be more dedicated to defense to impress his new coach, and he also needs to do a better job maintaining an even keel. He and Andrew Jones got into a nasty altercation last season during a home game against West Virginia, after which the Longhorns blew a 19-point lead to lose by two. “We would never want to take away his emotions; we just want him to channel them in the right direction,” associate head coach Rodney Terry says. “If he can do that, then that emotion can be very powerful and lethal.”

Jones, meanwhile, says he is healthier than he has been in a long time. The former McDonald’s All-American out of MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas, was a starter from day one and averaged 11.9 points per game his first two years, but in January 2018 he was diagnosed with leukemia. As he took a leave of absence from the team and went through debilitating treatments, Jones wasn’t sure if he would ever play basketball again, much less return to the level he had been at before. But he beat the disease, rejoined the Longhorns, and last season he led the team in scoring (14.6) and was named second team All-Big 12. The arrival of the transfers will make the competition for minutes in the backcourt even more intense, but Jones has overcome bigger challenges. “I know who I am,” he says. “I know I can fit with a bunch of high-level players. I’ve been forced to do that through my whole career.”

The Longhorns are also hoping that Jase Febres regains his previous form. The 6-5 senior from Houston started his first three seasons, but he sustained a season-ending microfracture in his left knee in February 2020 and had surgery a month later. He missed the first 12 games last season and then averaged 5.2 points in 16.8 minutes off the bench the rest of the way. “We’re optimistic he can be as healthy as he’s ever been,” Beard says. “He’s starting to get his body underneath him again.”

Among the remaining guards, Devin Askew has the best chance to crack the rotation. He was once the top-rated point guard in the Class of 2021 on the 247Sports Composite, but he decided to reclassify and enroll at Kentucky as a freshman. Askew started 20 games for the Wildcats last season and averaged 6.5 points and 2.9 assists, but he also averaged two turnovers and shot 27.8 percent from 3-point range while leading Kentucky to one of the worst seasons in its history.

Beard also brought Avery Benson from his former school, where he was an end-of-the-bench reserve who over three seasons made 41.7 percent of his 3-point attempts. Benson was best known for his wild hair and energetic bench demeanor, which made him a fan favorite in Lubbock. Freshman guard Gavin Perryman is a long-range project, but Beard insists that we should not count out Tristen Licon, a 6-1 senior who came to Texas last season after playing four years at Division III Sul Ross State. Licon decided to come back as a super senior, and he has surprised the coaches during summer and fall workouts. “He can play, man,” Beard says with a chuckle. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you look out there early on, and he’s on the court and everyone is saying, who’s this guy?”


Timmy Allen was an All Pac-12 performer who never made the NCAA Tournament at Utah. (Courtesy of Texas athletics)
Wings: Talent, versatility, experience, defensive ability — there won’t be many players in the Big 12 who check all those boxes as emphatically as Timmy Allen, the 6-6 senior transfer from Utah. Last year he was one of two players from a Power 6 league to average at least 17 points, 6.0 rebounds and 3.5 assists. (Illinois guard Ayo Dosunmu was the other.) Allen was the only player in the Pac-12 to rank in the top 10 of the league in points (17.2), rebounds (6.4), assists (3.9) and steals (1.3). Utah, however, went 26-29 in the Pac-12 during Allen’s three years there and never played in the NCAA Tournament, which led the school to fire coach Larry Krystkowiak last spring.

Beard tried to recruit Allen out of high school and made a point to follow his career at Utah. He expects Allen to be one of Texas’ most valuable players. “He’s an IQ kind of passer,” Beard says. “He comes in with a defensive mentality from day one.”

Brock Cunningham became one of Texas’ more popular players during his first two seasons, partly because he’s from Austin, and partly because he embraces his role as glue guy with a penchant for making timely baskets. Cunningham has a strong, alpha male, stir-the-drink persona that leads Beard to compare him to the character Jamie Tartt on Ted Lasso. (Would that make Beard … Coach Beard?) Cunningham has more basketball skills than he often lets on, and his ability to earn minutes will depend on how well he develops them. “We always had to game plan for Brock at Texas Tech,” Beard says. “He’s worked extremely hard this season on his shooting and ballhandling.”

Texas’ top recruit, Jaylon Tyson, could face a numbers crunch on the wing, but Beard has had freshmen in the past (Zaire Smith comes to mind) who showed early on that they deserved to play major roles, and he rewarded them accordingly.

Bigs: The Longhorns will be anchored up front by a dynamic offensive tandem in Christian Bishop and Tre Mitchell. Bishop is a 6-7 senior who was once rated as a three-star recruit by 247Sports coming out of Missouri. He moved into Creighton’s starting lineup as a sophomore, and last season he led the Big East in field goal percentage (68.1) while averaging 11 points and 6.4 rebounds in 23.4 minutes. Bishop was a major reason the Bluejays reached their first-ever Sweet 16. “He’s an above-the-rim, hard-playing, athletic guy,” Beard says. “He can literally guard all five positions. He’s a good pick-and-roll defender, which is something we strive for in recruiting. He gives us that athletic piece you have to have to compete in the Big 12.”

Mitchell is less known to casual fans, but he has been no secret around the Atlantic 10. During his two seasons in Amherst, Mitchell averaged 18 points and 7.2 rebounds and shot 34.2 percent from 3-point range. His inside-outside skills, combined with his defensive versatility, will make him indispensable in Beard’s system. “We have high expectations for Tre,” Beard says. “He’s as good a shooting forward as I’ve ever coached, and he’s a very cerebral player. He came here because he wanted to play at the highest level in the Big 12.”

The first big man off the bench will likely be another transfer, 6-9 junior forward Dylan Disu, who grew up in suburban Austin and came from Vanderbilt, where he led the SEC in rebounding last season (9.2) while averaging 1.2 blocks and 15 points per game. “When he hit the portal, we were doing chest bumps and back flips,” Beard says. Disu missed the final eight games because of a knee injury. He hasn’t been cleared to practice yet, but he should be available by the season opener on Nov. 9.


Marcus Carr was the consensus top transfer available this offseason and might hold the key to success for the Longhorns. (Courtesy of Texas athletics)
Spotlight on: Marcus Carr
There’s a good reason Carr was at the top of every ranking that listed the country’s top transfers. Last season, he led the Big Ten in minutes (35.8) and ranked third in scoring (19.4) and assists (4.9). He entered the NBA draft but put his name in the transfer portal as a backup. When college coaches started calling, Carr warned them that he would not be available to talk a whole lot because he was locked in on trying to get drafted.

Many coaches said they would wait it out, but as the late June deadline got closer, several of them panicked and filled their slots with other players. Beard, however, never wavered. He would check in from time to time to see how Carr was doing, and each time he voiced his hope that Carr would play well enough in his NBA workouts to stay in the draft. If he didn’t, Beard assured him he had a place at Texas. “We built that trust,” Carr says. “It went a long way.”

It went a long way with Beard, too. “Marcus was totally transparent with me from the start,” he says. “Everything he told me was the truth.” Going through the draft process enabled Carr to get valuable feedback from NBA executives. They expressed their desire to see him improve his 3-point percentage, make more plays for his teammates and enhance his vocal leadership. He expects to be more of a pass-first playmaker than he has been in the past. “I’ve always been a point guard, I’ve just been on teams where I was expected to score,” he says. “The thing I enjoy most on the court is setting my teammates up.”

Mostly, the NBA GMs told Carr they wanted him to prove he was a winner. He came to Austin to do just that.

Recruiting
Besides retooling his roster, Beard also revamped his staff. He brought Ulric Maligi with him from Texas Tech, lured Howard off Bill Self’s bench at Kansas, and then convinced Terry to leave his position as head coach at UTEP to come on board as associate head coach. The group obviously did an incredible job working the transfer portal in year one, but Beard is not going to be tethered to any single method of recruiting. “Everyone tries to label you, but we’re in the business here at Texas of finding the best players in the world, period,” he says.

That starts with signing the top high school players in Texas. Smart had considerable success in this area, landing in-state five-stars like Jarrett Allen, Andrew Jones and Greg Brown. The top freshman on this team, 6-6 forward Tyson, played for John Paul II High School in Plano, Texas, and originally committed to play for Beard at Texas Tech. It won’t be easy for Tyson to elbow his way into the rotation, but he has the build and mentality to give the older guys a run for their minutes. “Physically, he has a great frame and a ready-made body,” Terry says. “He just has to get used to the pace of play at this level and how hard you have to play in every possession.”

The team’s other freshman, 6-2 guard Perryman, was not rated by 247Sports as among the top 300 players in the country, but he comes with a strong Texas legacy as the son of Brandy Perryman, who was in school in the 1990s at the same time as Beard.

With so many seniors on this team, the coaches will be under pressure to land a big class next year. They already have one key commitment from Arterio Morris, a 6-3 guard from Dallas whom 247Sports ranks as the No. 23 player in the country. As the staff hits the road, they know they need to find guys who are not only good players, but who are also the right fit. “Our job is to find players with the same DNA our leader has,” Terry says. “That means guys who are going to have a great work ethic, high character, and who will be all about the program.”

Schedule analysis
On top of all the whirlwind responsibilities Beard faced when he took the Texas job, he also had to put together a nonconference schedule. That wasn’t easy considering at the time Texas only had four players in the program. If Beard knew how many quality transfers were on the way, he might have scheduled more aggressively. Even so, the Longhorns’ slate is pretty high quality.

Three of Texas’ best nonconference opponents were assigned via league-to-league challenges. On Dec. 9, Texas will play at Seton Hall as part of the Big 12-Big East Battle. The game will take place at Prudential Center in Newark, but Beard says he hopes to play in Madison Square Garden regularly starting next year. And on Jan. 29, Texas will face Tennessee at home in the Big 12/SEC Challenge. That game should draw plenty of attention, given that the Vols’ coach, Rick Barnes, was Texas’ coach from 1998-2015. Texas will also play Stanford Dec. 19 in Las Vegas as part of the Pac-12 Coast-to-Coast Challenge.

The real marquee game will take place Nov. 13 at Gonzaga, which will be the consensus preseason No. 1 team. Texas and Gonzaga were supposed to play last season, but that got scuttled because of the pandemic. The return game next season will be a hot ticket in the Moody Center, the $338 million multipurpose arena on campus which is scheduled to open next April.

This will be Texas’ final season in the Erwin Center, where it has played home games since 1977. The Longhorns will play their usual row of guarantee games there against Division I schools, many of whom are in state. The highlight of that stretch will be the Nov. 29 game against Sam Houston, which will be played in Gregory Gym, a 4,000-seat band box which last hosted a Texas men’s basketball game in 1977. “I love playing in those throwback gyms,” Beard says. “I’ve done it everywhere I’ve coached.”

The ceiling
No team in America will enter the season with a higher ceiling than Texas. A few might be as high, but none will be higher. The coaches didn’t just bring in lots of talent, they have assembled a group that looks like it can play together. Sure, they don’t play the games on paper, but putting this impressive bunch on paper was a critical first step.

If there’s one player who will play a key role in making sure everything works, it’s Carr. He has been a big-time scorer throughout his career, but on this team he will have just as much value as a passer. It won’t be easy for him to figure when he should be pass-first, and when he should be shoot-first, especially considering all the other players have the same NBA aspirations he has. Carr is effective playing off the ball, but he knows full well his ticket to the pros is as a point guard. If he truly puts the team first, and if everyone else does the same, then Texas has every chance to end its season in New Orleans.

The floor
On the other hand … there sure are lots of new faces in this locker room. It’s nice to have game shows and pickleball matches, but getting everyone in sync on the court requires a lot of reps. It’s not just the players who have to figure all this out, either. This season will be one long trial-and-error process for the coaches as well. Which guys play best together? Whose strengths align with whose weaknesses? Who’s most comfortable in a given situation on offense and defense? The only way to find those answers is to watch them play. And the clock is ticking.

Like a lot of talented teams, Texas will go through its difficult stretches, especially with the Big 12 so strong again. It’s easy to keep everyone on the same page when you’re winning. The chemistry will get tested when the losses happen. It’s also a lot easier for players to say they are all about the team during the summer and fall. There are a lot of competing agendas on this team, and it won’t be easy getting them all into alignment.

Final report
Beard has proven himself to be a coaching savant. He could have stayed forever at Texas Tech, where he made a ton of money and had total job security, but he came back to Texas because he can’t resist taking on new challenges. He was clearly energized by the move, and his success at recruiting the portal reflects that. This is one of those situations where the right coach has come to the right school at the right time.

Sure, Texas is a football school, but everyone loves a winner, and if the Longhorns can live up to their preseason billing the Burnt Orange faithful are sure to turn out. The eyes of Texas will be upon this team from day one. If all goes according to plan, the Longhorns should be something to see.

 

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