NCAA Basketball: 10 candidates to replace Chris Beard as Texas HC

Rodney Terry

Teams tend to prefer to make a big splash with these kind of high-impact coaching hires, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, we’re going to take a closer look at Terry, who’s serving as the interim head coach and has plenty of experience in Austin with these Longhorns. He also has a decade of head coaching experience and has righted the ships in the weeks since Beard’s news came to light.

Terry bounced around as a high school coach before getting his first D1 collegiate experience at Baylor before Scott Drew arrived. He spent nearly a decade as an assistant at Texas before taking the Fresno State job back in 2011. Terry took the Bulldogs to an NCAA Tournament and won a bunch of games before departing for UTEP after seven years. He had finished his third season leading the Miners when Beard added him to his Texas staff just a year and a half ago.

He’s won five of his first six games as interim head coach and has plenty of previous head coaching experience. The added bonus of more than a decade on the Longhorns staff doesn’t hurt either. The issue is that Texas can land a much more experienced head coach, someone who’s won more than 163 games in his first ten seasons. If continuity is the goal here, Terry is a great basketball mind, but Texas wasn’t considering him two years ago when he’d won just 43% of his games at UTEP.