Texas Hoops Hot Board: Candidates who could replace Shaka Smart - 247Sports

The Shaka Smart era has come to an end after six seasons with the Texas head coach headed to Marquette to be the new head coach of the Golden Eagles. Smart went 109-86 with the Longhorns, which includes a 52-56 record in Big 12 play and an 0-3 record in the NCAA Tournament.

Smart’s final game on the Forty Acres will go down in the record books as arguably the most stunning NCAA Tournament loss in program history, a 53-52 first-round defeat suffered at the hands of Abilene Christian on Lucas Oil Stadium’s Unity Court in Indianapolis last Saturday. Coming on the heels of the program’s first Big 12 Tournament championship — Texas beat Oklahoma State on March 13, 91-86, at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Mo. — Smart’s tenure experienced the highest of highs and the lowest of lows with the span of seven days.

The Longhorns haven’t advanced out of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament since 2008 and while Smart’s 2020-21 squad, which finished with a 19-8 record and was ranked No. 9 in the final Associated Press Top 25, earned the program’s fifth top-three March Madness seed (No. 3 in the East Region) since the tournament expanded to a 64-team field in 1985, it’s up to the next head coach to get the program back to the level where Rick Barnes had it in the mid-2000s with one Final Four (2003), two trips to the Sweet 16 (2002, 2004), two Elite Eight appearances (2006, 2008) and a share of two Big 12 regular-season championships (2006, 2008) from 2002-2008). With the program about to go through its third coaching transition since Tom Penders was hired in 1988 (Barnes was hired to replace Penders in 1998 and Smart was hired as Barnes' successor in 2014), Horns247 has put together a list of coaches who could emerge as candidates to replace Smart.

The first edition of Horns247's Hot Board lists the candidates in alphabetical order. According to Horns247's Chip Brown, an apparent frontrunner for the job has already emerged for the job and he's listed along with a likely No. 2 choice and other candidates who are worthy of consideration and could realistically find the Texas gig appealing enough to make their way to Austin to be the 25th head coach in the history of the program.

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