Reports: Texas fires Rodney Terry after two seasons as head coach

Diminishing returns doomed Terry’s tenure not long after it started.

A little more than two years ago, Rodney Terry was announced as the new head coach of the Texas Longhorns after leading the program to its first Elite Eight appearance since 2008 after taking over for Chris Beard, who was fired for cause after his arrest for felony domestic violence.

With players from the Elite Eight team and former players in attendance at Terry’s introductory press conference, there was a sense of excitement about the decision by athletics director Chris Del Conte — it was a feel-good choice to elevate the longtime Texas assistant who had worked under Rick Barnes during the golden era of Longhorns basketball.

But there was also a sense of trepidation, a lingering, underlying concern that Del Conte made an emotional decision instead of a rational one to remove Terry’s interim tag without an open coaching search, that Del Conte was pushed into keeping Terry by the team’s remarkable tournament run.

Terry’s 126-108 record in seven years at Fresno State that included a single NCAA Tournament appearance and 37-48 record in three seasons at UTEP without a postseason appearance of any kind simply weren’t good enough to earn consideration for a job like Texas in an open coaching search, 10 years of evidence that Terry is a solid coach, but not a great one.

On Sunday, Del Conte had to admit his mistake, firing Terry after going 21-13 with an appearance in the NCAA Tournament’s round of 32 last year and 19-16 this year following the First Four loss to Xavier on Wednesday, according to reports from Jeff Borzello of ESPN and Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports, who fueled more speculation about Xavier’s Sean Miller as a potential replacement.

Terry’s termination came after reports emerged immediately following Wednesday’s loss that Del Conte would move on from his head basketball coach.

Terry’s tenure took two significant setbacks before he even coached a game as the new head coach, losing consensus five-star recruits Ron Holland and AJ Johnson to professional basketball. The loss of Holland, the nation’s No. 2 was a particularly significant blow that forced Terry to fill out his roster with additions from the NCAA transfer portal.

Combined with the foot injury sustained by Dylan Disu that kept Texas from making it to the Final Four during Terry’s interim year and difficulties deciding on a primary ball handler, the Horns never truly gelled until late in the season, finishing tied for seventh in the Big 12 and landing a No. 7 seed in the tournament, bowing out in the second round against No. 2 seed Tennessee.

Terry suffered another defection in his 2025 recruiting class when guard Cam Scott opted to remain in South Carolina, but that miss didn’t have the same impact on the Longhorns roster build that Holland and Johnson did the year before. Even so, when Texas missed on New Mexico State transfer forward JT Toppin to Texas Tech, the Horns weren’t able to develop the type of frontcourt depth the team needed.

Build around star freshman guard Tre Johnson, Texas battled a rash of preseason injuries that spilled over into a poor non-conference schedule that did little to prepare the Longhorns for the physical grind of playing in the SEC, which ultimately sent 14 of its 16 teams to the NCAA Tournament. Only at full health for two regular-season games, Texas struggled to adjust to its new conference, cratering late in the season by losing seven of the final nine games to finish 6-12 in the SEC.

The team never developed an identity around its defense, which ranked 111th in efficiency over the last 10 games of the season, and the offense often devolved into isolation basketball, playing at a slow tempo with a low assist rate.

Two wins in the SEC Tournament were enough for the Horns to sneak into the NCAA Tournament field, but team’s deficiencies were so glaring that it never felt like Texas had a real chance to make it past the first game or two.

The pieces never quite fit together with the roster build failure looming larger than any game-to-game coaching deficiencies, a sign that Terry struggles with the roster management aspects demanded by the current one-year roster era of college basketball.

An Angleton native who played college basketball at St. Edward’s, Terry spent a year as an assistant at his alma mater and a year as an assistant at Bowie High School before serving as the head coach at Somerville and Angelton. Terry’s first big break came when he was hired as an assistant at Baylor, where he spent two years before taking a job at UNC Wilmington. Barnes hired Terry to his staff in 2002, where he remained until taking the Fresno State job in 2011. When Beard took over in Austin for Shaka Smart, Terry left his head coaching job at UTEP to return to the Forty Acres.

After Wednesday’s loss to Xavier, Terry was asked to reflect on his tenure with the Longhorns.

“I’ve been at Texas 13 years, and there’s not a year I haven’t made the NCAA Tournament or been a part of the NCAA Tournament. I have a lot of pride in terms of being a Longhorn. I love being at Texas. I don’t think anyone has been a part of Texas basketball that’s been more successful than myself. I’ve been a part of the top five seasons in this program’s history of this program,” Terry said.

“I give our guys a lot of credit for putting themselves in a great position to be here tonight. At the end of the day, it’s in God’s hands. At the end of the day, I live my life, I’m a believer, and if God has plans for me to be here, then I’ll be here. If He has plans for me to be somewhere else, He’s the one with the master plan at all times. That’s what I live my life by. I don’t live my life by no man. I live my life by God. I got strong faith.”

Now Terry’s time at Texas is officially finished after 13 years as an assistant or head coach for the Horns.