Texas Brings HAVOC to the Big 12
Posted by Brian Goodman on April 3rd, 2015Less than a week after the firing of Rick Barnes, Texas has hired its next head basketball coach. And as we speculated on Monday, VCU’s Shaka Smart is packing his bags for the Lone Star State. Once he’s introduced, Smart will be expected to immediately breathe new life into a program that had fallen into a lull over the last four seasons. Given its resources and location, the Longhorns have no legitimate reason to not be a force in the Big 12 and nationally on an annual basis, and Smart’s track record, enthusiasm and unique style of play make him Texas’ best bet to restore and possibly exceed its basketball peak from a decade ago.
As the new head coach at Texas, Shaka Smart will look to bring deep postseason runs back to Austin.
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking of Smart is his vaunted “Havoc” defense. His Rams led the country in defensive turnover percentage every year between 2012-14 and turned in a top-10 performance again this season. Had Briante Weber stayed healthy, the Rams may have ended up leading the nation again in that category. Smart’s teams also excel on the other side of the turnover column, giving the ball away less than 18 percent of the time in every season under his watch.
As with any coach making the jump from a mid-major to power conference, though, Smart will face the challenge of competing with consistently good teams on a regular basis. The Rams famously beat #3 seed Purdue and #1 seed Kansas on their way to the 2011 Final Four, but in the four seasons that followed, VCU went just 16-19 against teams rated in the KenPom top 50 and failed to return to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament. In fairness, many of those games came on the road or in neutral settings as the college landscape provides little incentive for power conference teams to travel to places like VCU, but Smart’s results against top-notch competition suggest that immediate success isn’t a given at Texas no matter how good a fit he is.
The flip side to that argument is that Smart should fare better with improved access to high-level prep talent. His program’s newfound visibility from the Final Four season along with several strong performances in subsequent campaigns has led to greater attention in living rooms across America. Over the last four years, seven prospects from ESPNU‘s Top 100 have committed to VCU. The high school gyms of Texas will be relatively new territory for the Wisconsin native, but it’s easy to picture him cleaning up where Barnes struggled during the late stage of his tenure in Austin. Whether he can get blue-chip recruits to buy into his system – or adapt if he can’t – could ultimately be what determines Smart’s success, but getting those players to campus won’t be an issue.
Zooming out to Smart’s impact on the Big 12 in general, his hiring brings an immediate injection of youth to the conference’s coaching ranks. The league loves to brag about the success and experience of its coaches, and they can certainly back it up, even if the Big 12 has fallen on hard times in the postseason as of late. Bill Self and Tubby Smith have championship rings. Bruce Weber has coached in a national championship game. Bob Huggins has been to two Final Fours; Lon Kruger one. The league boasts four head coaches with at least 500 wins under their belt, second only to the ACC’s five. And while all of that is great for proving legitimacy, it also means that those guys have been in the game for a very long time. Smart’s addition to the Big 12 fraternity brings more Final Four experience, but with Smart taking Fred Hoiberg‘s spot as the conference’s youngest coach at a shade under 38 years old, it also brings innovation and next-generation cachet. Obviously, none of that will matter if he doesn’t live up to the heightened expectations of the Texas job, but a fresh face at a marquee program certainly brings a new level of excitement to the league.
Texas basketball fans should be extremely excited about the dawn of the Shaka Smart era. While athletic director Steve Patterson has an unorthodox approach that rubs some people the wrong way, credit is due for pulling off what UCLA administration’s and a handful of others could not. While the Texas job is probably more desirable than the one in Westwood these days, luring Smart away from Richmond has been no easy task. That doesn’t inherently make him more valuable, but after a four-year period of Longhorns basketball that resulted in frustration and eroding fan interest, the hire of Smart should restore faith in the program’s ability to regularly contend for national titles. Now it’s up to him to deliver.
Brian Goodman a Big 12 microsite writer. You can follow him on Twitter @BSGoodman.
