Usually, a mid-year coaching change is a sign things are going poorly. In the case of the Texas Longhorns, it was so much worse than that.
When Chris Beard was arrested for felony domestic assault on December 12, there was never likely to be a good outcome for anyone involved; when he was finally fired on January 5, it came while his former team was fresh from a historical ass-kicking at the hands of Kansas State, surrendering 116 points in 40 minutes against the Wildcats.
The schedule had blessed interim head coach Rodney Terry with an easy-ish start to a situation he could never have prepared for—his first five games as head coach were Rice, the husk of Stanford, Louisiana, Texas A&M Commerce and Oklahoma. But the Kansas State loss felt like a huge red flag, particularly defensively. The Big 12 is filled to bursting with big scary monsters this year, a year in which historically weaker squads like TCU and Kansas State are angling for top-four seeds in the NCAA Tournament and even Oklahoma can wander into a matchup with a top-five team in Alabama and emerge with a 20-point win.