AUSTIN -- The urinals inside the Texas basketball locker rooms have wirelessly-charged gauges that check hydration. If it lights up green, you're hydrated. In the training room, Texas has a cryotherapy chamber. Outside the head coach's window of his corner office, there's construction on a state-of-the-art football practice facility.
Everywhere you look, you're reminded Texas aspires to be the best of the best. In the last three years, three different Longhorn programs have won national titles. Last school year, eight won SEC titles.
"It kind of motivates you to try to be the best team that you can be," new forward Dailyn Swain says, "because everyone else is winning."
The basketball program has never won a national title, hasn't won a conference title since 2008 and hasn't been to a Final Four since 2003, but it isn't as a result of not trying. From 2020 to 2023, Texas was a top-six spender nationally in men's basketball, according to U.S. Department of Education data. That peaked in 2020-21, when the Longhorns were first. In the NIL age, there's no doubt Texas is willing and ready to spend.
The Longhorns also have a state-of-the-art, 3-year-old arena -- one of the coolest in the sport -- whose initial design on a napkin is blown up in the concourse. (Its illustrator: Matthew McConaughey.)
This is the setup Sean Miller enters as the Longhorns' fifth coach in 12 seasons. A coach who once contended for the label of "best coach to never reach a Final Four," Miller and Texas form a pairing with similar intentions: to prove their best isn't behind them.
During a 10-year period from 2007-08 to 2016-17, Miller's teams at Xavier and Arizona made the Sweet 16 seven times, played in four Elite Eights and won six conference titles. From 2010 to 2017, only four teams (Kansas, Kentucky, Gonzaga and Wichita State) won more games than Miller and Arizona's 204. But those teams all made at least one Final Four; Arizona went 0-4 in regional finals.
Then came the 2017 FBI investigation into bribery and corruption in college basketball. An Arizona assistant was arrested. The Wildcats' play on the court fell off. Arizona fired Miller in 2021 as it faced five level-one NCAA violations. Ultimately, Miller was cleared of wrongdoing by the NCAA's Independent Accountability Resolution Process (IARP).
Out of the head coaches wrapped up in the 2017 FBI investigation, most have rebounded and had their moment in the spotlight since.
Kansas' Bill Self won a national title in 2022. Rick Pitino reemerged at Iona, made the NCAA Tournament, then went bigger by taking over at St. John's and winning the Big East. Bruce Pearl took Auburn to two Final Fours and just retired. Will Wade, fired by LSU, leaned into his rebellious narrative as the outlaw at McNeese State, where he made back-to-back NCAA Tournaments and leapt to NC State this spring.
Then, there's Miller.
Sure, Miller had a moment in his return to college hoops four years ago, winning 27 games in his first year back at Xavier and reaching the Sweet 16.
But those other coaches either won bigger or their storylines were sexier. With Miller, it almost seems like everyone has forgotten how good he once was.
Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte, familiar with Miller's success because he too once spent time at Arizona, did not forget. After hiring Miller, Del Conte said he found "a hungry dog, a dog who wants to win at the highest level."
Miller, 56, planned on finishing his career at Xavier. Last winter, he moved into a house he and his wife had waited almost three years to be built, with space for future grandkids and a basement for the team to come over and watch Selection Sundays.
But when Texas called, Miller knew it was a chance to get back to a place he felt he could win a national championship. His chance to remind college basketball what he was and how good he can still be.
Long before he was a coach, Miller was a dribbling phenom. He appeared in the 1979 film "The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh," dribbling three balls, with actor Nicholas Pryor asking, "How tall is your mother?" He traveled the country, performing at halftime shows, and even appeared on the "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.
And he hated the attention.
"Because as a young kid, other kids make you feel bad for being that, right? You're the guy that dribbles three balls, four balls," he said. "I wanted to show them, 'no, no, I'm the guy who's a good player.'"
What allowed him to be a showman also turned him into a player. He remembers his dad, John Miller, a longtime coach at Blackhawk High in Beaver Falls, Pa., making sure he never wasted a chance to improve. Once, as a 10-year-old, he was leaving for a Little League game with his bat and glove, and his father stopped him on his way out the door.
The walk to the ball field was about a mile. Grab your basketball, he told him, and work on your crossover and in-and-out dribble.
"If you're like everybody else, then you know what the results are going to be," Miller said. "So I don't want to use the word fear, but the reason that you dribble the ball to the baseball game is like, ah, this is that moment that gives me the extra edge that makes me different."
This has guided Miller's career. He got where he wanted to go, starting 124 of 128 career games at Pittsburgh and setting the school's assist record at the time. After graduation, he became a restricted earnings coach at Wisconsin, where he was then-assistant Stan Van Gundy's shadow for a year.
The No. 1 lesson Van Gundy taught him: As a head coach, you have to be yourself.
And what Miller always prided himself on was he loved basketball so much that his passion drove his work ethic and always opened doors. In the early 2000s, he scored an invite to the BC Retreat, a coaches clinic John Calipari and Larry Brown held annually at Memphis. The attendees were mostly head coaches. Miller, an assistant at Xavier at the time, had connections to Calipari -- both are from Pittsburgh and Cal recruited Miller -- but got in by agreeing to take notes and diagram the plays discussed. After the two-day clinic, Miller would mail a packet to everyone there. One of those packets was 137 pages.
When Miller had it rolling at Arizona, he was recruiting elite prospects who he'd get to play hard and be meticulous. Ryan Anderson, who started at power forward for Miller in 2015-16 and is now an assistant coach on his staff, remembered a road game at Gonzaga where he spent hours in preparation simply repping how he would show and recover on Kyle Wiltjer ball screens -- hands up, ruining the angle for the passer.
"I always felt super, super prepared when I was playing for him," Anderson says. "There was nothing in the game that would surprise me."
Before the FBI's "we have your playbook" news conference that changed everything at Arizona, the Wildcats had won three of the previous four Pac-12 titles and made the second weekend four out of the previous five years. It seemed like a matter of time before Miller and the Cats made a Final Four.
During that first season with the FBI/NCAA cloud hanging over the program, Arizona won the Pac-12 again but got upset in the Round of 64 by Buffalo.
Then, over the next three years, there was some slippage. The impending NCAA penalties hurt recruiting, and it also took away a lot of the joy of coaching, Miller said.
As Arizona drifted further from making a Final Four, not making one became a weight, too.
"You start to fixate on what you haven't done or the result, instead of the more important factor, and that is what are these subtle changes or different things you can do to give yourself an even better opportunity to continue to get there and then push through?" Miller said. "What about your process can you look at and change and make better that gives your program the opportunity to keep growing and building? I got away from that.
"I started to become offended by, you're going to ask me when I'm getting to a Final Four? Do you know how hard it is to get to the Elite Eight?"
Texas chief of staff Ryan Reynolds, who has worked for Miller in 19 of his 20 years as a head coach, wasn't sure his old boss would coach again after Arizona fired him.
Reynolds got his answer when Miller and his brother Archie, who had recently been fired at Indiana and moved to Tucson, started a basketball podcast on the Field of 68 network in their year off.
"The podcast was almost therapeutic," Reynolds says. "Those guys gave him a chance to talk basketball. He kind of had the reputation at Arizona as a great recruiter. And we certainly got good guys, but he's much more of a teacher, coach."
Miller doesn't really have hobbies outside of his love for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He spent some afternoons playing "Madden" -- always with the Steelers -- but eventually, he got back to watching games. And he fell back in love with the game, watching the games of coaches he admired, traveling to see some coaching buddies and visit his son, who was a manager at Saint Mary's.
It was nice to have freedom, and when he wasn't studying the game, the ability to actually not think about anything at all.
"Your mind is always on your team, a player, recruiting, the next thing, responsibility," Miller said. "And you just start to live your life through that. I could be guilty of having a one-track mind. That year off also was able to re-center me in a big way, because I don't think all of us realize when someone says you're one-dimensional or you're all about this one thing, until that one thing no longer exists, you don't realize what that meant."
Miller decided if he coached again he would not micromanage everything, allowing his staff to do more. He also started to think more big picture about what he would change.
The change ended up being right in front of him.
Arizona was winning under new coach Tommy Lloyd, the longtime Gonzaga assistant who led the Wildcats to a Pac-12 title and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament with a core of Miller's former players. Miller had always admired Gonzaga, and because the two programs were the best out west, they'd become rivals.
When Miller got the Xavier job, he implemented Gonzaga's pick-and-roll continuity offense. The Musketeers finished with the second-best adjusted offensive efficiency of any team Miller had coached. His teams at Xavier also played faster and increased the efficiency in pick-and-roll and also increased the usage and efficiency of post-ups.
"I've told the guys here I feel like they're getting the best version of him," Anderson said. "He's learned so much from his experiences and I think that's with every coach, but to see him grow with the new era of college basketball has been cool. There's been some coaches that have decided to retire because they don't want to deal with all the change. There's other coaches like Coach Miller who's adapting with the change and actually ahead of the curve in a lot of different things."
A few weeks back, looking out his office window at the football facility being built, Miller remembered a game he watched over the weekend. "It's really amazing what the dude at Indiana is doing," he said of IU football coach Curt Cignetti, winning at a program without much history.
"They look like Alabama!" he said.
Cignetti was a graduate assistant at Pittsburgh and later a quarterback and tight ends coach, and Miller is convinced they probably crossed paths when he was starring for the Panthers. The years do not line up, but you get the sense at some point he'll want to pick the brain of his fellow Pennsylvanian.
He's always trying to learn from other coaches," Texas assistant Adam Cohen said.
Miller, emulating Calipari and Brown, held his own clinic in Austin in June. Jeff Van Gundy, once a guest at the BC Retreat, was there, along with former NBA coaches Mike Budenholzer and Mike D'Antoni. Miller thinks back to those clinics with Brown, who was the most famous and successful of all the coaches there, yet asked more questions than anybody. "He reminded me a lot of my dad," Miller said. "He's obsessed with the game. He loves it."
These are coaches Miller respects, and you imagine he'd love for coaches to speak of him in this way one day. Not that he worries about what outsiders think, but as you get older, you start to think about how you'll be remembered.
And there's one bucket list item that still nags at Miller: the Final Four.
"It's hard to describe to people what it feels like to lose in a regional final," Miller said. "Because you know those two words 'Final Four' means you did it. If you don't say those two words, you're put in a category like everybody else. But you're not everybody else."
This is something Miller used to talk about with the late Temple coach John Chaney, who lost in five regional finals and never made a Final Four.
It's why Miller once left Xavier for Arizona and why he felt the pull of Texas.
"I think that having the opportunity here," Miller said, "to give my program and our program, the staff that I'm a part of and the players, a great chance -- the best chance -- to do it, I thought that this was that opportunity."
Miller has a plan. He wants to build with high school recruits, especially in the talent-rich state of Texas, and then develop and retain. When it comes to the transfer portal, he wants to get to a place where he only has to go get the right one or two players. How Florida built last year's champion is "the gold standard," he said.
Miller is off to a good start, retaining four players from last year's Texas roster and bringing two players who played for him at Xavier. Every player he brought in from the transfer portal also has multiple years left of eligibility. There aren't any surefire pros on his roster, but considering how he recruited at Arizona, those could show up eventually.
Three days before official practices began, Miller explained to the Longhorns that his strength coach, his athletic trainer and himself formed a triangle. The players are in the middle. He explained the importance of taking care of their bodies, not staying out too late or making poor decisions when no one is looking.
"A group that's totally committed," he said, "that's when great things happen."
In this honeymoon phase, those great things seem inevitable. Texas has the coach it needed. Everyone else is winning at an elite level. And Miller is ready to do that again.