This week I'm Scattershooting while thinking about Rick Barnes and his future as the head basketball coach at Texas.

The 2014-15 season is going down as yet another underachieving season for Barnes while on the bench at Texas.

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Rick Barnes has entered Mack Brown territory. With Texas having to sweat it out until Selection Sunday to see if a 20-13 record will cause the NCAA tournament bubble to burst, a 69-67 loss to Iowa State seemed to be the straw that broke the camel's back when it comes the burnt orange faithful and their collective faith in Barnes.

Texas blew a 16-point lead in the Big 12 quarterfinals and lost at the buzzer, just the latest loss in a season where the Longhorns have seemed to invent ways to do so. Of the 13 losses for Texas this season, five have by three points or less with another loss (to Kansas on the road) coming by five points.

If those six games go the other way the Longhorns would have wins over Stanford, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa State twice and would be in the Big 12 semifinals (in theory) with a 26-7 record. That completely changes how people view the season, but that's not the case, and instead, the Longhorns, a team ranked as high as No. 6 in the polls at one point this season, have the label of being one of the most disappointing teams the country.

Which takes it back to Barnes being where Brown was in 2013. There will be some folks wondering out loud if Texas should part ways with Barnes, who will have taken the Longhorns to the Big Dance 16 times in 15 seasons if Texas indeed gets in this year, because of what he's done for the program.

Well, similar to Brown, what Barnes has done since the Longhorns made the Elite Eight in 2008 is extremely underwhelming. It's not the production expected from one of the better programs, and jobs, in the country.

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Since that Elite Eight appearance, the Longhorns haven't made it beyond the first weekend of the NCAA tournament (3-5 overall record). Only once in the past seven seasons did the Longhorns manage to post a single digit number of losses in a season (28-8 in 2010-11) and only twice in that same timeframe have the Longhorns finished fourth or better in the Big 12 (second in 2010-11, fourth last season).

Thompson is one of five NBA first-round picks Barnes has had over the last seven seasons, which haven't produced even one trip to the Sweet Sixteen.

Texas is 66-54 in conference play over the last seven seasons and has advanced to the finals of the Big 12 tournament just once in that period. To boot, since the end of the 2007-08 season Texas is a mere 20-19 in the month of March.

And, perhaps more importantly than any other argument against Barnes, Longhorn fans have seen this collapse before.

The infamous 2009-10 season saw the Longhorns rise to No. 1 in the polls after a 17-0 start. After that start and the unprecedented ranking the Longhorns went 7-10 and – like this season and the 2011-12 season – weren't guaranteed a spot in the tournament until the bids were officially handed out.

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That one historically bad season puts this campaign in an even worse light. Barnes showed that season, even with a team that featured three future NBA first-round draft choices, handling a collection of elite talent can be problematic and wasn't a cure-all.

But Barnes turned it around the next season. Even with Avery Bradley, Damion James and Dexter Pittman gone, the Longhorns added Tristan Thompson and Cory Joseph, finished 13-3 in the Big 12 and came within a disorganized mess of a final few moments in a tournament loss to Arizona from reaching the Sweet Sixteen; perhaps going beyond that point.

This season was supposed to be a redux of the 2010-11 season for Barnes with his entire squad back from last season and the addition of Myles Turner. And even though the Longhorns lost Isaiah Taylor for 10 games with a wrist injury, thus disrupting the rotation and the flow of the offense, there never seemed to be enough minutes or the right situations used to feature the player who was viewed as the missing piece Texas needed to take the next step.

The end result as Texas sits on the cusp of learning its NCAA fate is a season eerily similar to that forgettable 2009-10 season. This is where Barnes has entered the same territory Brown found himself at the end of his tenure leading the football program – how many passes does someone get before it becomes clear it's time for a change?

Turner was named Big 12 Freshman of the Year despite not having a defined role with the Longhorns this season.

At this point Turner has no incentive to stay should Barnes be retained -- at least in the NBA he can get paid to be underutilized and sit on the bench at key moments in the game -- and as good as Eric Davis and Kerwin Roach are there's no evidence to suggest either of those freshmen would be on the floor enough to give Texas a much-needed scoring punch from the backcourt.

It would be one thing if this season was the first time the Barnes regime showed these cracks, but its not even the first time in recent memory where Barnes has taken a team with championship aspirations and grossly underachieved.

Similar to the end of Brown's run with the football program, it seems like the basketball program under Barnes is broken beyond repair. It feels all too similar to what I wrote after Texas suffered a 38-13 loss to Oklahoma State in 2013, which went down as the worst home loss of Brown's Texas career:

Texas will wake up one day from its slumber as a giant that will compete for championships with a talented roster playing in a program that demands excellence. It just isn't going to be now. Not unless something changes.

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So, if Barnes is out, who's in?

Expect Wichita State's Gregg Marshall and Virginia Commonwealth's Shaka Smart to be the names who jump to the top of the list. Each of them have been to a Final Four more recently than Barnes (Marshall in 2012-13 and Smart in 2010-11) and appear primed to take big-time jobs at some point in the near future.

Looking for an off-the-radar candidate? Utah head coach Larry Krystkowiak coached portions of two seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks after an nine-year NBA career, but more importantly he's quietly resurrected the Utes. He improved the program's win total by 11 games from his first season (6-25) to the second (15-18), lead Utah to a berth in the NIT last season (21-12) and is currently overseeing a squad ranked in the top-25 this season with a 24-7 record entering tonight's Pac-12 semifinal against Oregon.

Marshall will be one of the candidates who jumps to the front of the line if the Texas job comes open.

Looking for a candidate pretty far off-the-radar? Don't be surprised if John Lucas emerges as a candidate for the job, especially since his relationship with Steve Patterson dates back to when Patterson's father – then the general manager of the Houston Rockets – took Lucas with the No. 1 pick in the 1976 NBA Draft. Lucas, a former NBA coach who is now a private coach in Houston, could not only get another year (potentially) out of Turner as the Texas big man traveled from Euless to Houston to work with Lucas on his own, but the Longhorns would be able to potentially dominate Space City in recruiting.