Last Saturday evening, I participated in an exercise in frustration. I watched the NCAA Tournament second-round matchup between my beloved Texas Longhorns and the Tennessee Volunteers, the favored square coached by former Longhorn Rick Barnes. The game was alternately exciting and exasperating, a captivating rock right that ended with Tennessee beating Texas 62-58, a disappointing but not unexpected outcome given that Tennessee was certainly the better squad. Nevertheless, it made me reflective about the Longhorn men’s basketball experience.
The thing about being a Longhorn fan is that, when it comes to basketball, you know it’s never going to be as important or as good as football could and should be. You know that, and that’s ok. Football is the name of the game in Austin.
That said, one cannot help but get hopeful and dream of the Longhorns making a real run in March Madness. They’ve done it in recent memory—the T.J. Ford-led 2003 Final Four run—and in the 2023 NCAA Tournament they made it to the Elite 8. Just because basketball isn’t the main attraction like it is as Duke or UConn or UNC doesn’t mean success is impossible.
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But Texas basketball has largely been this narrative of disappointment.
Take a look at Texas’ season results in the seasons in between Elite 8 appearances (2007-08 and 2022-23) and you’ll see what I mean.
2008–09 NCAA Division I second round
2009–10 NCAA Division I first round
2010–11 NCAA Division I second round
2011–12 NCAA Division I first round
2012–13 CBI first round
2013–14 NCAA Division I second round
2014–15 NCAA Division I first round
2015–16 NCAA Division I first round
2016–17 No postseason play
2017–18 NCAA Division I first round
2018–19 NIT champion
2019–20 No postseason held
2020–21 NCAA Division I first round
2021–22 NCAA Division I second round
This litany includes first-round upsets in the 2016 and 2021 tournament (at the hands of Northern Iowa and Abeline Christian—the Northern Iowa one on a half court short while the Abeline Christian upset was a real shocker) and a seemingly endless run of 6, 7, 10, and 11-seed appearances all while never making it out of the first weekend. This spanned three different head coaches (Rick Barnes, Shaka Smart, and Chris Beard) and multiple NBA Draft selections.
Beyond those first-round upsets, probably the most vexing for me was the 2011 second-round exit at the hands of Arizona. It was a 4/5 second-round matchup, so they were playing a good Arizona team. But that was probably the best Texas team, from a talent perspective, until the 2023 squad. That was the Texas team with Cory Joseph and Tristian Thompson leading the way for a team that beat UNC and Michigan State, took eventual champion UConn to overtime, and beat Kansas in Lawrence during the regular season.
Yet they lost in the second round due to Derrick Williams converting a three-point play with seconds remaining and a five-second call on Joseph as he tried to inbound the ball. That was a team that could, I thought, make a deep run. Maybe not to the Final Four but could be a Sweet Sixteen/Elite Eight type squad. Yet they were done by the end of the first weekend.
This feels like the moment Texas has, by and large, been stuck in on the men’s basketball side. They have the talent to be a major player in the tournament in a given year, at least making it to that second weekend and, in theory, making a deep run at least once in a while. Programs that are similar to Texas—largely football schools but with the resources and footprint to be strong in basketball as well—have been able to do this. Yet it’s the constant falling short. The underwhelming. Especially after you have something you can build off of like the 2023 Elite Eight run.
Next year should be another potentially promising season for the Longhorns’ basketball squad. They’ll be bringing in an elite player in Tre Johnson as well as Nicolas Codie and Cam Scott even as Rodney Terry loses major contributors like Max Abmas and Dylan Disu (if Disu could’ve played in that Elite Eight game against Miami…). But can the Longhorns get out of the cycle of frustration? That is the question and we’ll all be waiting on the answer.