No More Mr. Nice Guy: The End of Rick Barnes in Texas

In Rick Barnes's farewell press conference as the head basketball coach at the University of Texas, he admitted that what had initially been reported as a "mutual" decision that he and the Longhorns part ways was more like a firing. Barnes had been asked to terminate some members of his staff, or to start packing his belongings. "The wins and losses are fleeting," Barnes said. "But it's the relationships that matter." He wasn't going to sell out his colleagues in order to buy himself security, and so he didn't. And so he had to be at this press conference.

Barnes's final season in Austin was his 17th. He's 60 years old, has made millions, and might already have a job lined up at Tennessee; standing on principle was easierfor him than it would be for some youngish also-ran at Siena or Monmouth or Morgan State or somewhere else on the knife edge of impending high school gym teacher-dom. That Barnes elected to step down rather than abandon his assistants—some of whom we can probably expect will follow him to his next gig—furthers the perception that Barnes has a general goodness about him. Taking any college basketball coach at their word is an inadvisable proposition, but Barnes has been around long enough and had enough nice things said about him by enough contemporaries that it's probably safe to assume that he is actually a kind man in a field full of schemers and rage-cases. He is, for all that, not a great basketball coach. But he has made a living doing what he does 28 years, and has more or less earned it.

Perhaps that goodness served Barnes well when he ventured in the living rooms of the best high school prospects in the country. For all that Barnes could and did not do, he did convince these teenagers that they needed to come to Texas instead of Kentucky, Kansas, UCLA, or Syracuse. It's not difficult to picture Barnes adjusting the various dials on his Carolina Lutheran preacherly voice, letting the accent thicken or thin as the circumstances dictated, weightily touching his heart with his hand, and making a passionate and not wholly dishonest appeal that he could take care of this particular 17-year-old power forward with legs like pogo sticks in a way no one else could.

He could teach that young man how to play basketball, Barnes would continue, and also how to be a better person. You see—here he turns to the kid's mother—the Texas Longhorns are a family, and he, Rick Barnes, would like to make her son part of that family, of which he would be a member no matter how many points he scored or mistakes he maked. Warm handshakes and words like "commitment" and "responsibility" would probably factor in somewhere.

In retrospect, it's these recruiting visits that comprise the better part of Barnes' c.v. at Texas. Because once those talented teeangers arrived on campus, everything generally went to hell. In 17 years at Texas, Barnes turned numerous future NBA players—10 first-round draft picks between 2000 and 2011—and five-star recruits into exactly one Final Four appearance and two trips to the Elite Eight. His teams have routinely been bounced from the NCAA tournament by lower seeds; the 2007 squad—which featured an I-should-absolutely-be-playing-pro-ball-right-now Kevin Durant and future NBA players D.J. Augustin, Damion James, and Dexter Pittman—was dismantled by a Nick Young-led USC in the second round.

In many of Barnes' seasons, the Longhorns would play well at the outset, maybe even cracking the AP top 10. They managed that this year, too. Then, as their opponents improved over the course of January and February, they would stagnate. Texas never won a Big 12 tournament under Barnes. They made the big dance almost every year, but they frequently seemed to limp their way in, doomed to exit earlyt. This season, they were a transparently sacrificial 11th seed, and were handled comfortably by Butler.

College basketball is strange and ugly, but Barnes demonstrates a manner in which it is just plain peculiar. It is big business, but it is also a place in which one can be a successful and long-tenured head coach while being an objectively incompetent, ahem, coach. Barnes may be a swell guy, and he's excellent at getting high school kids to overlook his mediocre postseason record to come play basketball on his team, but it has been evident for a long time that his teams don't grow over the course of the season and that he's overmatched once the ball is in the air. For all his other virtues, it's worth wondering whether Hobbesian predators like John Calipari, Jim Calhoun, and Jim Boeheim have spoken so well of Barnes over the years in part because they find him non-threatening. He's easy to get along with. We beat him by 12 every time out. The result has been a strange and contradictory career. Barnes is both an institution and a punchline.

If he is indeed headed to Tennessee, he will doubtless do solid work there. This has perhaps gotten lost after years of Barnes looking so goshdang flustered on the sidelines as he watched his gameplan get ravaged in real time: he took an afterthought of a program at one of the nation's most defiantly Football School football schools and turned it into, if not a powerhouse, a team that won 20-plus games each year. That's no small feat, and it's probably what his peers are talking about when they claim he's great at what he does.

A school that's still finding its way college basketball-wise after suffering the devastating consequences of Bruce Pearl inviting a recruit to a cookout—forget it, Jake, it's NCAA-Town—could do a lot worse than Barnes. He could help Tennessee do something like what Texas did, and in something like the same way. Rick Barnes could go into those living rooms wearing a slightly different shade of orange polo and work his tried and true rhetorical magic. In the end, all it might amount to is a second-round trap door pulled by some mid-major team with one-third the talent at Barnes's disposal, but that's not nothing. It is, finally, an achievement.