Coach's Corner

In the dark, cold, gray hours of a late November false dawn, most sports fans in Austin are still peacefully asleep. Some dream happily of a football season which exceeded expectations. Others are dreaming of a Heisman Trophy for a hometown hero. And for sure, it's time for football fans to sleep. A fun season is at its end. Yes, sleep, sports fans, slumber, fora few more hours anyway, in peace. A few of us will stay on watch while you rest. For we've seen some disturbing things. Disturbingthings indeed. Things which might cause a dreamer to toss uneasily in a rumpled bed. Bad things. Ugly things. But no need to wake up yet, Longhorn fan. Nothing can be done anyway, and dawn is coming soon. We'll keep the lonely watch until daybreak. Be ready, sports fans, for a shocking surprise before breakfast. Be prepared for a long day. Basketball season has already begun.

While you've been sleeping, the team formerly known as the Runnin' Horns (0-2) have lost to teams which will not be seen in the Sweet 16. In both games, including a blowout in the home opener against something called South Florida, Texas looked terrible. This team was picked to finish somewhere in the middle of the Big 12, mainly on the strength of their starting five. I think not. Not only was the catastrophic lack of depth ignored, but it's also clear the starting five were not analyzedcarefully. Rick Barnes has inherited a discordant team of spare parts, some of them pretty shiny to be sure, but like the spare parts bin of a Third World army, most of them just don't fit.

Building a winner from a bottom feeder in the ACC is like raising a guppy to bite a shark. Barnes can win. His record at Clemson (74-48) attests to that. What you're going to see out there isn't his fault. It'll be easy to recall the good old days of the Penders Runnin' Horns, but trust me on this, sports fans, you're still sleeping. This team doesn't have the talent to run up and down the floor any more than they're going to win this year with the style Barnes wants to play. The Golden Boy left a cabinet filled with flour but no eggs to turn it into pancakes. The gaps in the usually well-stocked cabinet became prominent last year, starting and ending with the rock bottom staple of every basketball table: guards.

That be guards who can shoot, and guards who can dribble. Your hometown team, you'll wake to discover, has neither. Penders, of course, made his rep as the perfect coach for guards who wanted to shoot all the time, flashy guards who'd be given free reign to slash and burn to their little gunner hearts' content. Guards were the high-test octane that made the Texas offense fly and soar. Travis Mays and Lance Blanks, though not recruited by Penders, flourished under his system. Joey Wright, B.J. Tyler, and Reggie Freeman followed, more than competently manning the busy Penders flight deck. But then, last year, the pipeline got gummed up. The oil stopped flowing. A 6'9" freshman with almost no ball handling, driving, or defensive skills was handed the sacred shooting guard position. The all-important point was poorly manned by a committee of guys who proved they couldn't dribble, pass, shoot, or make free throws. Ultimately, the job was given to DeJuan Vazquez, a small forward gamely trying to do something he was never recruited to do. Chaos ensued, but if you thought last year was ugly, wait 'til you make your first trip to the Erwin Center. At least last year, the Horns were 10 deep, playing a familiar system. The 6'9" guy was exciting, and he could shoot. The helter-skelter offense created open space for Clack, Vazquez, and freshman star Chris Mihm. You'd be surprised, if you were awake yet, to know that Mihm managed zero rebounds to go with 8 points in 26 minutes against SF. Clack barely scored in 32 confused minutes. If you weren't one of the "crowd" of 6,000, which was half of that, you may have missed this. And worse still, these numbers, dismal though they are, weren't the real problem. No, that takes us back to the pesky guard position.

Ivan Wagner, an infrequently used bench guy whose shot was so erratic that even Penders didn't want him shooting, is the starting point guard. William Clay, a ju-co transfer, is the shooting guard. A fellow named McCoplin, a walk-on pulled from Gregory Gym, joins Vazquez, filling out the guard complement. Wagner, Clay, and McCoplin shouldn't be in the position they're in, but life ain't fair: There they are. So, a slow-down offense, combined with no dribble penetration, mixed with unreliable outside shooting, and toss in poor passing, equals static, create-your-shot looks for Clack, which is not his game, and frustration for Mihm. If all this weren't enough, then factor in the private locker room tension left over from the player rebellion (the direct antecedent of this stew) of last spring. We'll never know about that, but I don't imagine consistent losing will help much.

Some embarrassing losses are looming. Be ready. Mismatched pieces. Parts that don't fit, and too few of them anyway. No chemistry. It's going to be a long, long year in the Erwin Center. Maybe you should sleep late.