JUST-NOW : men’s vol basketball head coach Rick Barnes confirm dead at 69 from a brutal..⬇️😭🥹

Lots of familiarity, similarities as Texas’ Rodney Terry faces Tennessee and old mentor Rick Barnes
By Mike Finger,

There’s plenty of history and similarities between Texas coach Rodney Terry (left) and his old mentor Rick Barnes of Tennessee when their teams clash Saturday in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
There’s plenty of history and similarities between Texas coach Rodney Terry (left) and his old mentor Rick Barnes of Tennessee when their teams clash Saturday in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

This time of year, for college basketball coaches, it always is. It might not be right, and it might not be fair, but one game in March or April can brand a man as either a genius or a failure, and sometimes the reputation sticks forever.

Rick Barnes understood this. The staffers sitting around him in the locker room did, too. They knew on that night 21 years ago they’d still be talking about it 21 years later, because they all were about to coach in the biggest game of their lives.

It was the Final Four, at the Superdome in New Orleans, less than an hour before tipoff. The Texas players were about to return from warmups. The tension was unbearable, and a young assistant named Frank Haith silently wondered how his boss was handling it.

“Then I look over there at him,” Haith said of Barnes, “and he’s dead-ass asleep.”

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Haith chuckles at the memory now, partly because he still sees so much of the same unflappable calm from another assistant coach who was in the locker room that night in 2003. To be sure, he considers Rodney Terry and Barnes to be two of the most fiercely competitive people he’s ever met.

But as their teams prepared to face off Saturday in a second-round NCAA Tournament tinderbox, it was only the thought of trying to beat a friend that unnerved them.

“It is the life we chose,” Terry said Friday, the day before his Longhorns were set to play Barnes’ Tennessee Volunteers at Spectrum Center with a trip to the Sweet 16 on the line. “We have to take the good with the bad, and we have to have tough skin at times.”

Both men have had plenty of occasions to learn how to toughen it even more in the two decades since their loss to Syracuse in the national semifinals. Back then, Barnes had the Longhorns in the midst of their most successful stretch in program history, with a Final Four, an Elite Eight and two Sweet 16 appearances from 2002-08. Terry was around for all of those glory years as one of UT’s best recruiters.

Terry left in 2011 to start a head coaching career that did not go particularly well at Fresno State, where he made the NCAA Tournament once in seven years, or at UTEP, where he departed after three middling seasons.

Meanwhile, Barnes stopped winning postseason games at Texas, which never made it past the first weekend of the tournament from 2009-15. By the time he was fired, he was known as an excellent motivator and defensive coach with a penchant for letting boatloads of talent go to waste in March.

“I don’t think that kind of talk ever bothered coach (Barnes),” said Haith, who went on to head coach jobs at Miami, Missouri and Tulsa before returning to join Terry’s Texas staff this season. “The truth is, you have to get lucky.”

If there was any good fortune to be found at the end of Barnes’ Longhorns tenure, it was in where he landed after his dismissal. In 2015, Tennessee was looking for a coach who knew how to build something, and for one who might provide some stability to a program that needed it.

And as it turned out, after years of letting things get a bit stagnant in Austin, Barnes needed that challenge as much as the Volunteers needed him to take it.

“Coming to Tennessee was a blessing,” said Barnes, who’s guided the Vols to six consecutive NCAA tournaments, with two Sweet 16s. “I didn’t know it at the time.”

Likewise, Terry had no idea if he’d ever be a head coach again when he agreed to return to Austin as an assistant in 2021. But after head coach Chris Beard was fired following a 2022 arrest, Terry took over on an interim basis, and last March led the Longhorns to as many NCAA tournament victories (three) as they’d had in the previous 13 years combined.

In the meantime, at practices, in meetings and even during games, he sounds more and more like his former mentor every day. Once, an NBA scout visiting a Texas practice couldn’t resist pointing this out.

“Man,” the scout said to Terry, “if anyone hasn’t told you, you have a lot of mannerisms of Rick Barnes.”

Said Haith, laughing: “We say that all the time. We say, ‘That’s a Barnes. You’re acting like Barnes right now.’ We all see it.”

So far, Terry hasn’t been quite relaxed enough to catch a catnap in the locker room before a big game, as Barnes did at the Final Four 21 years ago. But the way Haith tells the story, Barnes was as focused and prepared and “ready to roll” as he’d ever been that day, and he sees Terry pull off a similar balance between quiet calm and competitive intensity.

Judgment, of course, still is coming. And as noted by Chris Ogden, the former Barnes player and assistant who now serves as Terry’s general manager, some grand pronouncements made about the loser of Saturday’s game are bound to be over the top.