Taylor: Smart is ideal hire for Texas basketball

Jean-Jacques Taylor, ESPNDallas.com

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Jean-Jacques Taylor joined ESPNDallas.com in August 2011. A native of Dallas, Taylor spent the past 20 years writing for The Dallas Morning News, where he covered high schools sports, the Texas Rangers and spent 11 seasons covering the Dallas Cowboys before becoming a general columnist in 2006.

You can quibble about the way Texas athletic director Steve Patterson forced out former football coach Mack Brown. And you're certainly entitled to complain about the way he went about finding Brown's replacement.

And there might be a handful of folks who are upset that he fired Rick Barnes, even though Barnes' teams had made the NCAA tournament in 16 of the past 17 seasons.

But there should be nothing but bouquets and champagne toasts for the way Patterson hired Shaka Smart, Barnes' replacement and the man who will makeTexashoopsrelevant again.

At 37, Smart was the best coach available since John Calipari ain't leavingKentucky and Coach K is staying at Duke.

Smart has a household name thanks to its uniqueness -- Shaka was named after a great African warrior -- and his success atVirginia Commonwealth. His teams play a frenzied, pressing, trappingstyle called "havoc" that generates excitement among players and recruits and should even get Texas' laid-back crowds hyped.

Most of all, he's a winner.

He won 26 games in each of his first six seasons at VCU, and he would've been perfectly happy spending the rest of his career there. Most of the times when coaches say they didn't want to leave, it's merely politically correct poppycock.

In Smart's case, it's the truth.

Shaka Smart called his decision to leave VCU for Texas a "no-brainer" after having been courted by several schools the past few years.Chris Covatta/Getty Images

After all, he reportedly turned down job offers fromIllinois, UCLA, Wake Forest and NC Stateover the past few years. He made nearly $2 million, which is more than enough to buy happiness in Richmond, Virginia.

And at VCU, he could've stayed forever because he took the Rams to the Final Four in 2011 and gave the program a relevance and national profile it could never buy.

"I've had some opportunities at some phenomenal institutions, but I felt my situation at VCU was so extremely special that I turned those down," Smart said at his introductory news conference Friday. "But when the opportunity was presented to me to be the head coach at Texas, I quickly realized this was something different.

"To me, it was a no-brainer."

Barnes is a good coach, which is whyTennesseehired him days after Texas fired him. He lost his job, in part, because you rarely felt as if the Longhorns maximized their potentialunder Barnes.

This season is a prime example. With a veteran team returning and high-profile freshman recruit Myles Turnerin the fold, the Longhorns were expected to have the talent to compete for the Big 12 title and advance to the NCAA tournament's Sweet 16.

Instead, they finished 20-14 and sixth in the Big 12 before losing in the round of 64 of the NCAA tournament.

There's no good reason Texas shouldn't have the best basketball program in the state, but it doesn't.Baylor is better. SMU is better.

Larry Brown took SMU from 15-7 to 27-10 to 27-7, winning American Athletic Conference regular-season and tournament titles in 2015, as well as the Mustangs' first NCAA tournament appearance since 1993.

Scott Drew has led Baylor to at least 23 wins in six of the past seven seasons.

Still, it shouldn't take long for Smart to make Texas the state's best program and among the best in the nation.

See, college basketball is all about the coach. Get the right coach, and it won't take him long to turn a program into a winner. This isn't football; all a basketball coach needs is one or two players and a team that believes doing what he says will lead to victories.

"This is an unbelievable opportunity for me as a basketball coach [to] help a group of young men pursue excellence," he said. "This athletic program is a championship program across the board.

"Teams are regularly competing and winning conference championships and national championships and making deep runs in the postseason. I'm extremely excited about building on the tradition of Texas basketball and helping this program do the exact same thing."

The reality is Smart had taken VCU's mid-major basketball program as far as it could go. At Texas, he'll have all the necessary resources to compete for a national championship.

Source: http://espn.go.com/dallas/story/_/id/12615218/jean-jacques-taylor-shaka-smart-ideal-hire-texas-longhorns-basketball