Nothing Better Than A Fresh Challenge And Billy Tubbs Meets It, Bringing A Work Ethic And Success To Tcu

Billy Tubbs isn’t worried about making the NCAA Tournament this year. A 20-win season isn’t even a realistic goal. Winning by 40 doesn’t really matter, either.

Those are just some of the things Tubbs wanted to get away from when he left Oklahoma last April to coach Texas Christian, a forgotten program heading nowhere, except the Western Athletic Conference in 1996.

It wasn’t that Tubbs was slowing down, lowering his own expectations and easing into retirement at age 59 after an impressive 20-year career. No. Actually, it’s quite the opposite.

Tubbs wanted to rekindle a spark that had burned out after 14 years in Norman. He needed to savor single victories again and not just count them as another step closer to 20.

Most of all, he wanted to build again, like he had at Southwestern and Lamar before making Oklahoma known for something besides football. He needed new challenges and TCU offered him one. A big one.

“You just need something new,” Tubbs said recently with the enthusiasm of a rookie coach. “I just think there’s a lot of fun in coming into a new program where you’re rebuilding and seeing players develop.”

The development has been quick as TCU jumped out to a 13-5 overall record and 5-1 Southwest Conference mark. The Horned Frogs already have won the same number of games as the last two years combined and they’re challenging for their first SWC title since 1987.

Tubbs has proven he still has the touch.

“Deep down, I wanted to see if I could win the most games I’ve ever won in my first year,” he said. “At Oklahoma it was nine. The other two places was 12. At least it’s nice to know I’m not slipping.”

But it wasn’t easy. The Horned Frogs took awhile to adapt from Moe Iba’s shackling, boring game that averaged 74 points per game last year to Tubbs’ up-tempo style.

“The first time I met with the team, there was no gleam in their eyes,” Tubbs said. “I never saw a real spark there. It worried me. But maybe it was because of the unknown.

“I think we were four, five games into the season before our guys really started to understand what we were talking about.”

All the off-season running suddenly made sense. They began to see why this wiry jogging nut with the glasses and sharp-looking suits had been so successful wherever he coached.

“He told us nothing we’d do would be easy,” center Kurt Thomas said. “I guess once we went through his preseason workout, we realized this man is for real. He started getting us in shape and that opened our eyes. We knew this wasn’t the same thing we had been going through.”

It wasn’t even anything close to what TCU fans were used to seeing.

Before Tubbs, the Horned Frogs hadn’t scored 100 or more points since 1990.

In his first game, they set the school scoring record with 119, then broke it with 120 in the next game. TCU cracked the century-mark in four of its first seven games.

“His attitude has really rubbed off on all of us,” said Thomas, who has thrived under Tubbs and is among the nation’s leaders in scoring and rebounding.

“`We see that we can win if we go out each and every night and play hard. He’s instilled that in us. Even in practice, we go out to practice hard to be ready for the next game.”

Fans love it, too. The average home attendance is up by about 100 per game from last year’s single-game high (4,145). And the Horned Frogs are 9-0 at home.

“Things have gone great,” Tubbs said. “It’s been a lot of fun for me because of the newness and the enthusiasm in the program. It’s been a lot of long hours, but it’s been fun because you stay busy all the time. There’s so many things to take care of.”

He’s not kidding. On this day, he squeezes an office interview between two telephone interviews in the hour before practice. Following the workout, he must be across campus to speak to a student group.

It’s not unusual for a college basketball coach to be in demand. It is, however, at TCU.

The school has little basketball tradition, with only 10 SWC titles in 83 years and four of those coming in the 1950s. There was a brief period of success in the mid-1980s, then Iba took over and mediocrity returned.

School officials decided to make a change last spring - good timing considering everything around them was changing. The SWC was breaking up and they were being left without a conference.

TCU hadn’t officially joined the WAC at the time, but it was obvious that’s where the school was going. Tubbs liked the opportunity, sensed TCU was ready to make a commitment to basketball, and was hired April 9.

“This (changing jobs) had been in my mind for four or five years,” Tubbs said. “But this happened quick. I had made up my mind that the right situation had to come and a lot of things meshed here.”

Switching conferences may have been the deciding factor that made this job so attractive to Tubbs.

“I think that’s what makes it even more exciting. See, there’s another new situation,” he said. “I’m just speculating now, but I don’t think TCU would have made the commitment if the Southwest Conference hadn’t broken up.

“TCU felt like it got a wake-up call. Hopefully, it’s a new era.”

The last era for Tubbs was a good one. In 14 years at Oklahoma, he won 71.6 percent of his games, went to the NCAA Tournament nine times and played in the national championship game in 1988.

But things were getting stagnant. Last year was the first since his debut season at OU that he failed to win 20 games. The Sooners hadn’t been to the NCAA tourney since 1992 and they hadn’t been past the first round since 1990.

It simply was time to go.

The decision looks good now, as does the future at TCU.

Some of the future already is in place as four high school players were signed in the fall. Knowing Tubbs, he’ll complement them with a few junior college transfers.

Maybe next year Tubbs will aim for 20 wins. An NCAA berth could be in his sights for the following season. Even winning by 40 will probably eventually be expected.

“We want to compete in the national top 25, the top 10, the top five,” he said. “Those are tough goals, but I’ve always chosen tough objectives. Why shoot for something that’s easy?”