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Sean Miller had a unique advantage at the start of his Texas tenure

Joe Cookby: Joe Cook06/04/25josephcook89
Sean Miller
Sean Miller (© Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images)

The new coach experience in men’s college basketball in the age of the portal has a regular look to it. A new coach arrives and meets with the roster. He determines who he’d like to stay, and that process goes both ways since players determine if they want to remain. Then, the coach may try to bring players from his previous stop as a way to help usher in his way of doing things before scouring the portal for outside help.

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Sean Miller went through this process. He brought in Lassina Traore and Dailyn Swain from Xavier, and those two have been pivotal in helping the Longhorns learn the ways of the new coach as the team approached the start of summer workouts.

“They know how we travel, how we practice, terminology,” Miller said last week at SEC Spring Meetings about Traore and Swain. “They know people. They know our strength coach. They know who I am. I do think they’ll be very helpful in bridging that gap when you’re a new coach at a new place with the other players.”

Those two helped the Longhorns that stayed: Chendall Weaver, Tramon Mark, Jordan Pope, Nic Codie. That quartet to this point has learned mostly from Traore and Swain how to operate in Miller’s program considering Miller hasn’t been able to interact all that much with the team during the offseason.

“They’re going to be able to, from that retention perspective, be very helpful in building,” Miller said. “If you look it, we have retention this coming year, my first year, in two different ways: from the two guys coming from Xavier and those returning from Texas. That’s a force that I don’t think we underestimate.”

There are more factors aside from Traore and Swain that helped Miller as he took over in Austin. The Longhorns that stayed had a familiarity with Miller even if they had never been in his program.

A short time before he took over as head coach, Miller’s Xavier team defeated the Longhorns in a First Four game in the 2025 NCAA Tournament. The Musketeers mounted a second-half comeback that featured 11 points from Swain (Traore missed the 2024-25 season due to a knee injury).

Texas not only had to study Xavier and how Miller ran a team, they had to play against it. That’s happened in some respects before considering Texas players in 2021 knew about Chris Beard from his days at Texas Tech. But for the new head coach to come from the program that knocked the Longhorns out of March Madness? There was the obvious drawback of the loss for what were Rodney Terry players, but in the process of building a program under Miller the First Four game was invaluable.

“I do think one thing that was very helpful for me was they just finished competing against the team that I coached,” Miller said. “Our team. Part of a young person’s questioning in the beginning is style of play. They had a good sense, whether they liked it or not, they had a feel through scouting and through playing that game of how we play, the pace we play at, how it felt. I was able to describe our style through that, and it just happened as well. That’s the uniqueness of Xavier and Texas playing so late in the season.”

Retention was a word used several times by Miller, but that doesn’t mean additions went by the wayside. Texas added the No. 1 portal class this cycle according to On3, with Swain, Traore, Simeon Wilcher, Matas Vokietaitis, and Camden Heide heading to Austin.

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They’ll join the group that knows Miller and knows Austin as the Longhorns look to make their second season in the Southeastern Conference better than their first.

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