So, Sean Miller

For those who have been around awhile, it is not news that I am famously loathe to draw conclusions about coaches early in their tenure. I continue to pull in more data points for years, to the point many people who read/hate-read my columns get frustrated with my general unwillingness to call a coach a bust when they’re already done with them. (This has worked in the opposite direction once, when Chris Beard had everyone frothing at the mouth for basketball tickets, so I guess my inertia is at least thematically consistent.) I am not going to break this tendency here, as we are only halfway through the first season of the Sean Miller Experience and the sample size is still small.

That said, what in the absolute shitfuck is going on with this program right now? Sean Miller is benching his best players in a conference game against Tennessee, effectively called them stupid children after the Mississippi State game, and is all-around calling his players out in a manner I never see from a first-year coach. Miller is doing poorly enough that Wescott Eberts, a man who already writes about Texas men’s basketball like the program punched his hospice-bound gam-gam in the face, has the knives out in a way he usually reserves for Mack Brown 10 years after the fact. Sean Miller currently exudes an energy of a guy who knows he’s about a loss away from getting fired rather than a guy with 5 years and many millions of guaranteed dollars left on his deal; it is weird enough that I’m about to start combing through old Arizona blogs to see if he’s just always been like this.

This is not to say Wescott or Miller is wrong, the team is not good. The talent deficiencies discussed previously are on display for everyone to see, this team’s defense is more theoretical than actual, they can’t reliably feed their low-post threat, and the best three-point shooter seems to think a pump-fake and a pass is what his coach wants. They are out of sorts enough that even the announcers have started commenting on how the team plays a lot of one-on-one offense, which was not what we were promised with this hire.

Let’s take a step back, though; it is not uncommon for a first-year coach to have issues putting together a team that fulfills his vision for what the program should look like. Transfer portal chaos means a lot of moving parts, and it means the support system around a head coach needs to be putting in work identifying and/or retaining talent to get as close to the ideal roster as possible. The double-edged sword of the NIL era means a program can be built up as easily as it can be gutted, and modern-day coaches need to be adept at this. So let’s check in on the first-year coaches in high-major positions, sorted by KenPom rank as of January 8th.

I don’t know, man, but when you’re looking up in the rankings at a pair of nepo babies, one of whom was selling medical devices for a company that sounds like they were washing money for an undisclosed X-Men science project when you were making the Elite Eight at Arizona, it’s not a great sign.

Maybe there’s some context we’re missing though; I’ve said in the past that Sean Miller didn’t have very much time to pull his roster together, that the compressed schedule of trying to put together a team after being hired in late March made it tough to get the players he wanted. So let’s re-sort this group by the date they were hired, I’m sure he got a much later start than his peers.

Oh. Well, uhh, that’s not great, either.

(Side note: good god, Buzz.)

Alright, let’s try something else; maybe comparing his starts to how other coaches did their first year at Texas, at least as far back as KenPom rankings go. Maybe that will give Coach Miller some good news.

Welp.

That’s Texas’ projected record on KenPom, and it’s the same projected record on Torvik’s site as well. There’s a high likelihood Sean Miller’s first season ends without a tournament appearance of any kind; I guess they could technically be selected for the NIT with a losing record these days, but does Sean Miller sound like he wants to spend any more time with this squad than he absolutely has to? If given the opportunity, he might hit the “sim to end of season” button right now.

(I am asking this metaphorically, I know he is physically still Sean Miller, the basketball coach from Pennsylvania. Unless he’s an alien; if an Andromedan had flown all this way only to end up coaching human sports while wearing a human skin, it might explain a lot about both the game results and his mood.)

This means Sean Miller is in line to miss the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time in his last 7 non-COVID seasons. (To be fair, Arizona was a projected 7-seed in the COVID year.) Here are his seasons as a coach:

Not every school is the same, not all of these are apples to apples, there’s a limited amount you can directly translate between Arizona, Xavier, and Texas, so I don’t want to overreact here. I bring this up for three reasons:

First, Texas hired him on the hopes that he’d produce results along the lines of Early Tenure Barnes, and not without reason. His run from 2007-2016 is really close to the best Barnes years, and getting something along those lines would be a distinct improvement over who Texas has largely been since 2011 or so.

Second, the problem here is that Sean Miller has not consistently produced on that level in 8 years now - this year is closer to Chaminade season Barnes - and the sample size is large enough that it’s worth at least considering he’s no longer that guy. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances here; it’s harder to make an Elite Eight at Xavier now than it was 18 years ago, it’s hard to build an elite roster when the NCAA and FBI are listening to audio tapes of your bag game as part of their investigation into you, etc. I don’t know that I believe Sean Miller forgot how to coach or recruit over that time, but that brings me to my third reason.

Third, running a college program is just worlds different than it was even five years ago. NIL and the transfer portal are two massive changes to how a coach builds and maintains a program, enough so that I think it’s reasonable to discount a coach’s high-major success prior to ~2021 at least a little bit. We’ve watched an entire generation of older coaches retire rather than deal with the new reality, and the organizations around a coach are so incredibly different that it’s hard to directly compare the two eras without some sort of caveat attached. Recruiting and athlete compensation are enormously complex endeavors and even a coach who knew how to throw bags back in the day may not be as good at getting NIL collectives on the same page now. I have no doubt that Sean Miller has the tactical acumen to succeed, but if he’s not as good at attracting talent as he was a decade ago, that’s not going to get Texas where we want it to go.

I’m not posting this because I think Sean Miller is going to fail at Texas, it’s far too early to start talking in those terms. His recruiting class for next season has started well, and maybe it’s just taking him longer to turn things around than some others in the portal era. This season has just been so far below my hopes, and Miller’s public reaction to the disappointing results has been so starkly different than I would expect, that I’m starting to reconsider some of the assumptions I had about his floor and ceiling at Texas. Let’s hope this season is the exception under Sean Miller rather than the rule, otherwise we might need to keep an eye on how Jai Lucas is doing at Miami.

Writing tunes provided by Problematic Otter