Texas travels to Mississippi State in next chance to embarrass itself as the Rodney Terry era craters

Fully off the rails, the season can’t end fast enough for Rodney Terry and the Longhorns.

Three straight losses and defeats in six of the last seven games have knocked the Texas Longhorns off the NCAA Tournament bubble and into a fetid garbage pit head coach Rodney Terry and his team have lit on fire in a collective act of self-immolation.

It stinks.

Well, everyone except for star freshman guard Tre Johnson, who is still out there fighting and clawing and competing trying to will the team to wins, earning his fifth SEC Freshman of the Week award after scoring 39 points in last Wednesday’s overtime loss to the Arkansas Razorbacks in Fayetteville.

The Georgia Bulldogs responded to that dominant performance by Johnson by relentlessly double teaming him in the latest embarrassing defeat for the Longhorns, an 83-67 blowout on Saturday at the Moody Center during which Texas trailed by as many as 27 points.

It was another game that featured Terry’s team fail to respond to the game’s physicality and intensity, a common theme over the last month even after the burly first-month introduction to the SEC that clearly defined how basketball is played in the rugged conference.

Just looking at the recent game scores are embarrassing — the home loss to Arkansas, the road loss to South Carolina, and the home loss to Georgia were all absolutely putrid performances, joining the home loss to UConn in that category.

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Again, as Terry would say, that’s a ringing indictment of the second-year head coach and his staff as athletics director Chris Del Conte faces a looming decision about the future of a men’s basketball program that currently represents an outlier at a school that isn’t on track to win the Directors’ Cup this year, but is, as a baseline, competing for conference championships in every sport.

The success elsewhere on the Forty Acres puts into stark relief the extent to which Terry has not been able to sustain the success of the Elite Eight run as the interim head coach two years ago with the decisions by Ron Holland and AJ Johnson to turn pro instead of playing at Texas dealing Texas a significant blow last year compounded by the inability to effectively build a roster or team chemistry around Johnson this season.

In a vacuum, Del Conte’s decision seems simple — fans fill the Moody Center to support Vic Schaefer’s No. 1-ranked women’s basketball team, but support is lagging for men’s basketball as it struggles, and with only one signee in the 2025 recruiting class, Terry is set up for another complete rebuild after this season with two massive data points suggesting the third data point will eventually look entirely too similar.

But Texas also has a revenue shortfall of $10 million forecast for the upcoming 2025-26 sports calendar in anticipation of revenue sharing with athletes as a result of the House vs. NCAA settlement that may make it more difficult to pay Terry’s buyout with three years left on his contract.

Combined with the buyout the Longhorns would owe the next basketball coach, that number is likely around $10 million or more with competitive yearly salaries for the SEC ranging north of $4 million per season.

And the fact that there aren’t any obvious candidates like Chris Beard four years ago means that one name floated on message boards from the basketball community is McNeese State head coach Will Wade, who was ignominiously fired from LSU for numerous recruiting violations, some of which were caught on FBI wiretaps.

Call that a hard pass for anyone who cares about ethics.

The bottom line, however, is that Terry’s tenure is increasingly untenable as the results at Texas over the last two years have looked too much like the 163-156 record he compiled over nine seasons at Fresno State and UTEP that included only a single NCAA Tournament berth rather than a coach who simply needed more resources and a bigger opportunity to succeed.

There are good reasons why things just don’t work like that in coaching ascensions, but Texas was put into an awful position by Beard’s personal conduct and the subsequent success that Terry had with his team.

Now it looks like it’s time to move on from that era entirely.

Before Del Conte makes that decision, the Longhorns have to play the No. 25 Bulldogs in Starkville on Tuesday at 7 p.m. Central on SEC Network in the final road game of the regular season before hosting the Sooners on Saturday at the Moody Center to close the regular season.

Under third-year head coach Chris Jans, Mississippi State will likely start the game as the more physical team while trying to keep Johnson from touching the basketball and the Bulldogs will likely open up a significant lead in the second half. If, or more likely when that happens, Texas may finally make a little bit of a run, or they might just collapse entirely like they did against Georgia.

With a 25-percent win probability, according to BartTorvik.com, the Horns haven’t done much in recent weeks to suggest the game will actually be competitive, which is why the Bulldogs are favored by 7.5 points on FanDuel.