Does Texas turnaround merit national honors for Barnes?

As Texas continues what will be the school’s greatest turnaround season since Rick Barnes took over from Tom Penders, pundits touting Barnes as the Big 12 Coach of the Year may be selling him short.

When the 2012-13 season came to its frustrating, merciful end, experts on college basketball and all things Longhorn saw a program in free-fall led by a coach seemingly disconnected from his team. Then came a mass exodus of players coupled with the arrival of a recruiting class without any five-star performers. Texas’ recruiting class ranked 45th nationally.

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A Google search of the term “Rick Barnes hot seat” returns any number of different postings predicting[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]   the end of Barnes’ tenure at Texas. A Sports Illustrated article  quoted a “high-ranking” university official saying he didn’t think Barnes could recover. When DeLoss Dodds retired, Steve Patterson’s introduction as athletic director only fueled the flames burning through a seat well-past hot.

That was December. Dysfunctional at best last season, the 2013-14 Longhorns couldn’t be more different if they wore maroon. After successive 19-point dismantlings of Oklahoma State and West Virginia, Texas is 20-5 overall, 9-3 in the Big 12 and considered one of the nation’s fastest-climbing teams, having won nine of its last 10 games.

In the process, Barnes has gone from the hot seat to just plane hot, though not in a sexy way, thanks to College Insider. How’d he do it?

Barnes has spoken repeatedly about addition by subtraction in terms of the players who are no longer with the program. Last year the coach seemed to spend as much time locked in a battle of wills with some of his key players, several of whom transferred following the season.

“We lost an edge there, but we got that back this spring,” Barnes said told Roger Kuniza of the Sporting News.

Without the unhappy campers, Barnes focused on the remaining players and the incoming recruits, all of whom had at least one trait in common: they wanted to be here. Even more importantly, though, they were all players Barnes wanted here, as assistant coach Rob Lanier told his hometown newspaper, the Buffalo News.

“We’ve got good players who want to be coached and who want to be good and they are willing to do what it takes,” Lanier said.

Good players, but not necessarily great players. Could Barnes actually be benefiting from losing recruiting battles for highly-touted Julius Randle, a sure-fire NBA lottery pick from Dallas who doesn’t figure to see his sophomore year at Kentucky?

Lanier asserts that it never hurts to have a McDonald’s All-American in the fold – T.J. Ford led Texas to the 2003 Final Four, Kevin Durant won nearly every NCAA Player of the Year award in 2007 and LaMarcus Aldridge helped Texas to the Elite 8 in 2005. But none of them stayed more than two years. And for every Ford or Durant there’s been a Jordan Hamilton or Myck Kabongo, whose early departures left fans – and coaches – wondering if some player-coach battles-of-wills were worth it.

“With that success in recruiting you attract some stuff in your program that might not fit your core values as a coach,” Lanier said.

So the 2013-14 team lacks – as fans and critics alike pointed out with zeal – a marquis recruit. And they’re better for it. While another Durant isn’t walking out on the Erwin Center court – yet, the current Longhorns do their best to emulate the school’s most famous hoopster.

“Barnes does not have any player on his roster this season, his 16th at Texas, who possesses Durant’s talent – not close – but he has a locker room full of players, all underclassmen, who share Durant’s other hallmarks: unselfishness, high character, a steeled work ethic,” writes Eric Prisbell in the Feb. 6 USA Today.

Prisbell quotes Barnes’ longtime strength coach Todd Wright, who sees daily the influence Durant left on the program.

“But the biggest commonality is this: Kevin Durant played the game for his teammates and still does. We now have that value back in the program.”

The returning players see the difference their play has made in their coach.

“Whenever he can have a team he can actually coach,” Texas junior Jonathan Holmes told Prisbell, “rather than seeing where everyone’s head is every day, he can actually do his job instead of trying to be a therapist.”

Barnes has gotten back to coaching, in the process going from coach on a plank to coach of the year, as Prisbell wrote Feb. 1.

There’s been no secret, no newfound coaching magic, to explain Texas’ turnaround, Lanier said.

“It’s not because Rick got some magic because if he had some magic he would have used it last year,” he told the Buffalo News.

Barnes doesn’t talk about his name and awards. Following Texas’ win at Baylor Jan. 25, he did address the Texas turnaround from last year.

“I guess I went from dumb to being smarter,” he said. “The bottom line is the players. These guys have done it all year. They made a commitment as soon as the season was over with and those guys they have been unbelievable. The young guys, you have to give them a lot of credit because they came in with no sense of entitlement.”

And that has them in the hunt for a Big 12 title.

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Question for the fans: What do you think of this year’s men’s basketball squad? Sound off below.

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