AUSTIN – Things looked mighty bleak for Xavier throughout much of its First Four game against Texas on March 19 in Dayton. The Musketeers trailed by 13 points with a little over four minutes to play in the first half and by seven with just under 10 minutes remaining in the second. As they began chipping away at the lead, the legion of fans who made the one-hour drive from Xavier’s campus in Cincinnati came alive. The contest was nip and tuck down the stretch, and Xavier capped it with a 16-9 run that delivered an 86-80 victory. It was the Musketeers’ biggest comeback win of the season.
The result was a triumphant moment for Sean Miller, who was at the end of the third season of his second stint as the Musketeers’ head coach. “I’ve never been more thrilled with a win,” Miller said. “The spirit of the crowd, the intensity of the game. It had to be one of the greatest First Four games ever. I was really embracing the moment.”
Little did Miller realize the ironic turnabout that would follow that moment. Two days later, Xavier’s season ended with an 86-73 loss to Illinois. Two days after that, Texas fired the coach Miller defeated in that First Four contest, Rodney Terry. Terry’s dismissal had been in the works for several days, so by the time the school announced it that Sunday, Miller’s agent, Jimmy Sexton, had informed Miller that Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte wanted to interview him. Miller accepted the position during a Zoom call with Del Conte later that night. The school announced Miller’s hiring on Monday, March 24, and on Tuesday, just six days after that First Four win over Texas, Miller held his introductory press conference in Austin.
It was a dizzying turn of events, to say the least, but given the current environment around college basketball, schools and coaches have no choice but to move at warp speed. The day that Texas announced Miller’s hiring was the same day the NCAA’s transfer portal officially opened. That gave Miller little time to ponder Del Conte’s offer, but fortunately for both parties, there wasn’t much to think about. “It’s hard not to see the future of college sports through the eyes of Texas and the SEC,” Miller told Hoops HQ during a lengthy interview in his office this week. “It’s a powerful place.”
“It’s hard not to see the future of college sports through the eyes of Texas and the SEC. It’s a powerful place.”
New Longhorns coach Sean Miller
The transition brought an end to Terry’s rocky two-and-a-half year tenure, which began when he was hired on an interim basis early in the 2022-23 season following the suspension and subsequent firing of head coach Chris Beard, who had been arrested on a domestic violence charges. (Those were later dropped and Beard has since been hired at Ole Miss.) Terry was named Beard’s permanent replacement after taking the Longhorns to the Elite Eight, but after a second-round loss last year and that First Four loss to Xavier, which followed a 13th-place finish in the SEC, Del Conte decided the program needed a change.
Miller had spent 12 years as the coach at Arizona, where Del Conte worked for six years as associate AD. The two did not overlap in Tucson, but Del Conte was plenty familiar with the way Miller’s teams won, and the way he operated. He wanted both for Texas. “In any coaching hire we make, especially here, they’ve had to have significant pelts on the wall to give us a blueprint,” Del Conte told Hoops HQ. “In the league we’re in, the coaching is off the charts. If you look at the coaches who’ve succeeded here, they had a roadmap of building programs that were successful at multiple schools at the highest level.”
Miller had never set foot in the city of Austin, much less toured the Texas campus, before he accepted the job. He had done plenty of Googling back home in Cincinnati, but that did not prepare him for the scale of the city, the UT campus and the athletic department’s expansive, modern facilities. “It’s beyond impressive,” he said. “You drive by the baseball stadium and it’s, Roger Clemens played here. You meet the golf coach. He coached Jordan Spieth and Scottie Scheffler. Everybody’s winning a national championship. You really feel that sense of excellence across the board. It reminds you very clearly of the expectations for this program that I’m now in charge of.”
Facilities and tradition are nice, but in today’s pay-for-play era the thing that matters most is the size of a team’s payroll. Miller declined to say specifically the budget he has been given, but added, “Chris Del Conte and the university understand where we are and I think they’ve embraced it.”
When a coach takes a new job in the portal era, there’s no time to rest or even look for a place to live. So while Miller’s wife Amy is back in Cincinnati trying to sell their house, Miller has been living with one of his assistants in a rented Airbnb and spending most of his time working the phones and hosting visits. It helped that he was able to retain five scholarship players, including two returning starters, 6-foot-2 junior guard Jordan Pope and 6-foot-5 senior guard Tramon Mark, as well as sixth man Chendall Weaver, a 6-foot-3 junior guard. “These guys made the tournament the last two years, so we wanted to keep as many of them as possible,” Miller said.
In addition, Miller has added three transfers: Matas Vokietatis, a 7-foot center from FAU who was named the AAC’s Freshman of the Year; Cam Heide, a 6-foot-7 sophomore who averaged 4.7 points and 3.6 rebounds in 19.6 minutes at Purdue; and Dailyn Swain, who came with Miller from Xavier and averaged 11.0 points, 5.5 rebounds and 2.6 assists as a starter last season. John Clark, a 6-foot-9 four-star center from Houston, previously signed to play for Terry out of high school and re-affirmed his commitment after Texas hired Miller. That leaves Miller with a total of nine scholarship players, so he is looking to add a few more.
Miller brought three assistants from his staff at Xavier in Ryan Anderson, Adam Cohen and David Miller. He hired two more in Ulric Maligi, who was at Texas under Beard and spent the last three seasons at Kansas State, and Kenya Hunter, who was on Miller’s first staff at Xavier and spent the last five seasons at Indiana. Miller also retained Chris Ogden to continue his role as UT’s General Manager.
As Miller discussed the challenges and opportunities that come with his new job, he evinced a sense of renewal that felt a long way from the despair he endured following his messy dismissal from Arizona in the spring of 2021. That move was made three-and-a-half years after the school had become embroiled in the FBI’s investigation into college basketball, which resulted in assistant Emanuel “Book” Richardson being sentenced to 90 days in a federal prison bribery charges. The NCAA alleged five Level I violations against Arizona and one against Miller for failing to promote an atmosphere of compliance. Arizona fired Miller after self-imposing a one-year postseason ban.
Arizona appealed to the NCAA’s Independent Accountability Resolution Process, which concluded that Miller had, in fact, extensively promoted an atmosphere of compliance and levied no sanctions against him. Xavier hired Miller the following March, bringing him back to the school where he had previously served for five years as head coach before leaving for Arizona in 2009.
The year that Miller spent out of coaching was difficult, but he looks back on it as one of the most important of his life. He remembers, for example, how much he enjoyed spending Thanksgiving with his family without having to worry about what happened in his team’s last game or how to prepare for the next one. The hiatus also forced him to reflect on his career with fresh eyes. He realized he had allowed himself to focus too much on what he hadn’t done (make a Final Four) as opposed to what he had (four Elite Eights).
“At that point in my life, I needed a break. I needed a reset,” Miller said. “I really understood at the end of that year the importance of reminding yourself that you do this because you love the game. That can be lost in the grind, where you think if you win, you live, and if you lose, you die. And that’s no way to live.”
Del Conte did his due diligence on the way Miller’s tenure ended at Arizona and said he had no concerns about bringing him to Austin. If anything, he liked that Miller was back on the upswing after going through all that adversity. “When he left Arizona, that wasn’t the way he wanted it to end,” Del Conte said. “So now you have a hungry dog that has a point to prove.”
Miller has indeed traveled a long and winding road to Austin. The final steps may have been taken rapidly, but now that Miller is on the job, he can begin writing this new chapter with fresh perspective, confidence, and most of all, appreciation. “If I hadn’t gone through some of those highs and lows, I don’t know if I could be as prepared or as eager or hungry or determined at this point as I currently am,” he said. “I do believe the version that I am today is the best version that I’ve been coaching. Nobody has to remind me that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
