Texas Tech basketball: Players that need to lead the way against TCU
Tonight, Terrence Shannon Jr., Jahmi’us Ramsey, and T.J. Holyfield need to step up as the Texas Tech basketball team heads to Fort Worth.
Every time the Texas Tech basketball team faces TCU, I can’t help but be struck at how different the two coaching situations for the respective programs are. Without question, Texas Tech is in a much more advantageous position now, but there was a time not long ago when most of the nation did not feel that way.
When Jamie Dixon came back to his alma mater in 2016 after a successful run at Pitt, the move was lauded as a coup by nearly every observer. In fact, most were even predicting that he, not Beard (who was hired the same year by Tech) would be the one to bring unprecedented success to a Big 12 school that has long considered itself a football school.
After Dixon hired an initial set of assistants known for their recruiting prowess, highly-respected CBS basketball inside John Rothstein sang his praises.
"“…he’s putting himself in position to land elite players in an effort to compete in a league that saw seventy percent of its teams reach the NCAA Tournament last March,” Rothstein wrote in May of 2016."
That’s yet to play out. In the four official classes that TCU has signed since (not counting the 2020 class yet), Dixon’s average class has ranked just No. 5.7 in the Big 12. Only once, 2017, did he ink a class that was higher in the conference than No. 5 when he landed the 4th-best class according to 247Sports.com.
Meanwhile, Beard landed the No. 2 class in the conference in 2019 and has the top 2020 class thus far. After signing the No.10 class in the Big 12 in 2016, none of his signing classes have been below No. 5 in the conference since.
On one hand, it’s easy to see why Dixon was so hyped when he came to Cowtown. He had led Pitt to eleven NCAA Tournaments in his 13 years on the job. That’s impressive given that he was doing do in a very rugged Big East Conference.
But a closer look shows that cracks had begun to form in the dam in his last two years. From 2014-16, he was just 17-19 in conference games and he went to the Big Dance only once, in 2016 when the Panthers lost in the first round. In fact, in 2015, his team lost in the first round of the NIT.
What truly separates Beard and Dixon has been postseason success. Of course, Beard has taken his last two teams to the Elite Eight and National Title Game respectively while also scoring an upset over No. 5 seed Purdue in the first round of the 2016 NCAA Tournament while at Arkansas-Little Rock.
Meanwhile, Diox has just one Elite Eight appearance and two trips to the Sweet 16 in his 17 years as a head coach, all at either Pitt or TCU. In addition, his teams have been one and done in the Big Dance four times.
When he arrived, he immediately began beating the drum about competing immediately and not going through a rebuild. That sounds similar to what Red Raider football coach Matt Wells said when he arrived. Maybe there’s a coach speak textbook that is passed around the NCAA.
"“There is no rebuild here. I told our guys that the other day,” Dixon told Jimmy Burch of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “I know it’s not what you’re supposed to say as a first-year coach. You’re supposed to say, ‘Give me time. We need to rebuild. I need to get my guys.’ These are my guys. We’re here to compete right away. We expect to and you can’t settle for anything else.”"
But ironically, what might need to be rebuilt now is Dixon’s relationship with his alma mater. That’s because this past offseason he had his bags packed and the car running as he was ready to head to UCLA.
However, those in charge of the Bruin athletic department couldn’t or wouldn’t agree to pay his full buyout and TCU refused to negotiate meaning that Dixon had to tuck his tail and sheepishly return to Fort Worth. How a team is expected to buy into what a coach that so pubically tried to leave them behind is selling seems hard to imagine but that’s the task facing the Horned Frog basketball program these days.
Isn’t it interesting how time changes perspective? Just under four years ago, TCU was being lauded for making a huge splash on the coaching front by pilfering away from a prominent program one of the game’s most recognizable names. Meanwhile, Texas Tech made a hire that would not have been a blip on the national radar had it not been for the fact that Beard left UNLV after two weeks to come back home.
Since then, Dixon has gone just 23-32 in Big 12 games and is yet to finish higher than 5th in the conference. Meanwhile, Beard has a conference mark of 35-24 and has claimed one Big 12 title while finishing second the previous season.
Head to head, Beard leads this series 5-1 and tonight, his team needs to push that to 6-1 to move out of a tie with the Horned Frogs in the Big 12 standings (both teams sit at 3-2). For that to happen, these players need to take their games to a new level in Forth Worth.