Rick Barnes is a dream candidate for NC State fans to be Sidney Lowe’s replacement. As coaches stay longer and longer in one place, expectations rise and criticism grows if results don’t continue to trend upward. It happened to Tom O’Brien at Boston College and it happened to Herb Sendek at NC State. Will it happen to Rick Barnes at the University of Texas as well?
There is no way anyone can call Barnes a bad coach. He has won more than 500 games and will lead a team to the N.C.A.A. tournament this year for the 16th consecutive season, a stretch that dates to his days at Clemson. That ties Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski for the longest active streak. Texas is one of six colleges to advance to the Round of 16 in five of the past nine years. Included in that run is a trip to the 2003 Final Four, the first time since 1947 that Texas advanced that far.
But the ghosts of N.C.A.A. tournaments past still haunt Barnes. He is 0 for 5 coaching in first-round N.C.A.A. tournament games between No. 8 and No. 9 seeds. In his 12 N.C.A.A. tournament appearances at Texas, eight of his losses were against teams with lower seeds.
Some of those were forgivable, like when the No. 1 Longhorns lost to the eventual national champion Syracuse, a No. 3 seed, at the 2003 Final Four. But some losses still make Longhorns fans grimace, like the first-round losses to Temple, a No. 11 seed, in 2001 and to No. 10 Purdue in 1999.
“I don’t care,†Barnes said late Tuesday of the criticism. “I’ve been in this so long, I could care less about what other people think. I quit a long time ago worrying about that.â€
Barnes is worried about his team, which showed that it had Final Four potential in victories over Kansas, North Carolina and Texas A&M. But Texas has also shown enough flaws lately to be the prototypical office pool head-scratcher.
Will their N.B.A. talents and once boundless promise translate to March success? Much will depend on whether Barnes has any magic stored up his sleeve.
