Rodney Terry gives sound advice to players before Texas Men’s Basketball win over Rice 87-81
“You know there’s going to be things like this the rest of your life and it’s how you deal with them right now, adapt and adjust, and at the end of the day we have a job to do.”
~ Rodney Terry, Assistant Head Coach Texas Men's Basketball
AUSTIN, Texas — After a day full of massive chaos and uncertainty, Texas Men’s Basketball players were faced with — life! Then, about an hour before tipoff, maybe sooner, Assistant head coach Rodney Terry was told that he would be the acting head coach for the game against Rice.
Earlier in the day around noon, the NCAA came out with the new college basketball rankings and dropped Texas to No. 7 after being No. 2 for several weeks.
The weather in Austin all day long was cloudy with a funk in the air, or fog as the weather folks call it, that would not go away.
In a somewhat shocking twist, Rice took the lead early and did not give it up until three minutes into the second half when Marcus Carr hit a three-pointer. Texas would keep the lead until Rice tied the game with 5:33 left. Texas tied it back with a little over two minutes left, but Rice took it back again only to give it back and finally the game ended in a tie 72-72.
In overtime, Texas took the lead and never gave it back after Marcus Carr and Sir’Jabari Rice scored all the points (15) in overtime.
Terry commented that he took the top older guys on the team and had a talk with them. He called them young men instead of players or students because these young men already knew what adversity looked like in life. They responded because they had a job to do.
Senior Marcus Carr scored a season high 28 points, Timmy Allen dropped 15 points, Dillion Mitchell scored 12 points, Brock Cunningham pulled down a season-high 10 rebounds.
We all have bad … really bad days sometimes and Rodney Terry’s advice was perfect, “.. it’s how you deal with them right now, adapt and adjust, and at the end of the day we all have a job to do.”
Not only did Terry share great wisdom with the team, he then went out and showed the team and world how to put those words into action. Leaders lead!
Texas Men’s Basketball plays Stanford on Dec. 18 (Sun) with a noon tipoff at the American Airlines Center in Dallas that will be on ESPN.
#HookEm.
