One of the things you learn when you start looking behind the curtain of how a college sports program runs is that the percentage of what your average fan sees happen in public is even smaller than what you expected. Back when I wrote about Shaka Smart’s tenure, this manifested in several ways; there were stories about him accidentally burning bridges with Texas AAU kingmakers because he wouldn’t consult them as often as they liked, stories about the players he would invite to his kid’s birthday parties, stories about how much harder during practice he rode the players in which he saw the most potential. These were all things that never saw the light of day to anyone not actively digging into the particulars of the program, but influenced the product on the court in myriad ways, sometimes positively and sometimes not. Very few people really know everything that’s happening in a given program; I wouldn’t say I did, just that I saw enough to understand the scope of what I wasn’t seeing, and tried to account for this whenever possible.
Due to in equal parts design and attrition, I am no longer as plugged into the background machinations of Texas basketball as I once was. It takes up less of my brain & free time but also makes me less able to fill in the blanks, so I’m more reliant on what I see playing out in public than I used to be. This is one of the reasons I’ve been as concerned as I was about Sean Miller’s press conference rants; I would have found them unusual regardless, but with fewer ancillary streams of information, they become a larger percentage of the available picture. His bluntness in calling out his players is new to Texas Longhorns basketball (at least the men’s side) as Barnes, Smart, Beard, & Terry were rarely interested in specifically going after guys in public, and it’s not something you see much of in high-major basketball. The odds that Sean Miller might just be a dick were getting pretty high!
I say all of that, and now I want you to watch the 12 second video I’ve posted below:
That is Sean Miller, the same guy who threw his players under the bus by saying they’re throwing themselves in front of buses, going up to Jordan Pope not long after he committed a turnover & giving him a hug while pumping him back up. This is the same Jordan Pope who fans and other writers have been hammering all season - sometimes fairly, sometimes not - who would later in the game hit an insanely-contested corner three to keep BYU from coming all the way back. A season is a culmination of thousands of little moments and it’s not generally great to overinflate the importance of a single one of them, so I’m not going to claim this two-second exchange going into a TV timeout was something more than it was. I bring it up because it was evidence of the other side of Sean Miller’s passion, a side most of us probably don’t see much because we don’t get to see how he is with players when the cameras are off. In retrospect, maybe the odds that Sean Miller might just be a dick were a little too high, especially after watching a game where we saw Dan Hurley and Mick Cronin engage in a two-hour Kabuki Theater of Extroverted Psychosis. Those guys are dicks.