Rick Barnes

E

elface

250+ Posts
This is the year for Rick Barnes to make his mark. This is the year to blow out of the water all the cliches about Rick Barnes.

No more will I have to hear Rick Barnes can't coach his way out of a paper bag.

No more will I have to hear Barnes is a great recruiter but a terrible in-game coach.

No more will I have to hear that Barnes offensive sheme is stilted and non-creative.

No more will I have to hear that the parts are greater than the sum.

Well, I certainly won't hear it in this forum as there ain't **** going on for basketball talk.

It's a damn shame that there is so little real excitement shown for a national championship caliber team.

I know it is football season and we here in Texas don't give a rat's *** about anything outside of football, but this basketball team can be the equivalent of the 2005 football team.

Serious questions here.

Would the Texas team of 2007-2008 make the elite eight if Barnes hadn't messed with their confidence midstream?

He changed a team that seemed to play really well together in the early going with wins against UCLA and Tennessee and created a team that kept it close against everybody until DJ Augustine closed the games out.

Would the Texas team make the tournament last year if Barnes became Penders and just let the team play? Texas was in almost every game, they just didn't have the closer.
 
First you say Rick Barnes is wrongly accused of being a sub-par coach, then you provide instances of how he took a great team and turned them into a very good team. I don't understand I guess. Yes, he did indeed make a great team worse, we all know that. How does that help your claim?
 
It is my opinion that Barnes reworked the EE team from a more balanced offensive team to a single player who dominated the ball. Augustine fulfilled this role and was subsequently characterized as a closer.

I am not criticizing Barnes for what happened in 2007-2008 or 2008-2009. For all I know, the EE team needed to be reworked to accomplish as much as they did. My question is would they have gone to an EE if the balanced offense team played the rest of the season. That team might have been upset in second round against Miami.

The same scheme was supposed to be used for last season, with Abrams filling the role of Augustine. But Abrams couldn’t do it. Games were close down the stretch, but we didn’t have that closer. Mason did an adequate job at the beginning of the season as a pg and Balbay played okay even as he had one eye on the bench. But Mason lost confidence and Balbay played tentatively. If Mason and Balbay played with a Penders-like abandon would that team make it to the second round of the tournament or beyond. That is my question. Did Barnes take the 2008-2009 team as far as it could go?

My goal is to foster conversation in the forum which is why the first part of my post is a critique on the deadness of this forum.

Barnes may not be the best coach on campus, but he is my favorite coach, yet that doesn’t mean I agree with everything that he does. I think the conventional wisdom of him (as stated in the clichés) is overblown. This year’s team is almost a perfect team for him and the expectations are greater. I expect this team to be a realistic candidate for the national championship.
 
The Augustin led Elite 8 team hit a roadblock in the form of Memphis. A Memphis team that for all intents and purposes won the National Championship if not for late misses on free throws and a miracle 3 at the end by Kansas. Plus we matched up real poorly against Memphis with their big guards.

If we had been in other brackets we might have gone to the Final 4. By the way, we beat that Kansas team in the regular season, I can't remember in the Big XII tourney if we got beat by Kansas or some other team.
 
Their was no way we were beating THAT Memphis team without the NCAA stepping in a year and a half sooner than they did.... We had a great year though.
 
I don't know if the UCLA game is a good example of team basketball vs. relying on one player on offense, unless you are using it as a comparison study. Guys not named Augustin or James took 15 shots in the first 13 1/2 minutes of that game, while Texas was moving out to the double digit lead. Guys not named Augustin or James combined for only 10 fg attempts over the remaining 26 1/2 minutes.

But put me in the camp that thinks Texas had a lot of talent but flaws that year, and it had little chance against Memphis when Memphis chose to defend by not collapsing on Augustin so much as allow the guy in the middle to challenge his shot (quite physically at times) while the rest of the team concentrated on cutting off Augustin's chamces to kick out to shooters. I remember Packer talking about how Texas needed to spread the floor, and I wondered if he was watching the game at all. With Augustin not getting calls on bumps underneath and having few passing lanes, Texas was pretty much screwed.

I have no desire to even imagine Penders ever again acting as the UT coach, so I will decline comment on what he might have done with last year's team.
 
How would taking a balanced team and making them one-side ever improve them, that makes no sense. Barnes is my favorite coach as well, right ahead of Muschamp. And like you I agree Barnes has his weaknesses, as does Muschamp (though nobody here seems to agree with that claim).

The team was not as good after that game against UCLA--fact. Would they have beaten Memphis in the Elite Eight? Almost assuredly not, we matched up awfully with them. Do we get blown out? I doubt it, maybe something like 10 or 12 points.

I never said we would have gone further in the tournament, I meant that we would have done better during the season (such as not losing to Wisconsin and Mizzou).
 
Of course, it's possible Texas just caught Tennessee on a bad night when Texas had one of its best nights (relative to where they were in season development), and so they had a huge win. Over the course of a year, every team gets one game in which they play near their best, and their opponents play near their worst, and the results are misleading. Perhaps that was Texas's game like that that year.
 
Football fan here, checking in to say that I am VERY pumped up about the basketball season. It's a perfect combination of the guys we've already gotten to know (Dexter, James, Johnson, Mason) mixing with the guys we've been awaiting to get here or get eligible. Something old, something new--is Jai Lucas something borrowed?
 
What I remember about the UCLA game were the backdoor cuts and movement by the offense. It may have resulted in more shots for Augustine and James, but that stands to reason as they were our best players.

One reason to change from a balanced offense scheme was to put the ball in the hands of your best offensive player who didn't make turnovers.

The use of Penders was as an adjective. In no way would I want Penders to be the coach. I recall favorably what the swimming coach told Rick about the FF team. Ease up. Balbay would have benefitted from that approach last year. I'm not sure whether Mason would.

I think the great game against Tennessee was as much due to Pearl as it was to Texas. Tennesesee doesn't defend real well and Pearl reminds me of Penders.

The only factor to change the outcome of the Memphis game that year would be if Durant stayed for another year. Barnes switched gears before conference began, so the Memphis game is irrelevant. What if no change, Texas was a number one seed in the midwest or out west.
 
As to the "damn shame" part, it always will be difficult to turn attention away from football at Texas toward a sport that hasn't started full team workouts.
 
I can get just as frustrated as anyone about Barnes being more defensive minded and apparently lacking an offensive game plan down the stretch of a tight game, but ......

Come on. Comparing to Penders. I assume with respect to an offensive game plan. Really? Penders, simply relied on his top offensive players going nuts. That's not a game plan.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Weekly Prediction Contest

* Predict HORNS-AGGIES *
Sat, Nov 30 • 6:30 PM on ABC

Recent Threads

Prediction Results Threads

2024 Schedules

Back
Top