The 2026-27 Tarleton State Texans are the newest new thing in college basketball — a program starting over, on purpose, with a coach who has never done this particular job before and a roster that barely existed six months ago. When athletic director Steve Uryasz announced last February that Billy Gillispie would not return, ending a six-year run that carried the Texans from Division II into the WAC, he promised "a championship-caliber coach to continue our incredible momentum." The search ended in the Utah State locker room, minutes after a Mountain West tournament win, when associate head coach Eric Haut told the Aggies he was leaving to become the 16th head coach in Tarleton State history. The players mobbed him. Stephenville has been waiting for the new era ever since.
Haut is the anti-Gillispie in the best way: 22 years coaching at the NCAA level, eight as an associate head coach across Utah State, Northern Kentucky, and Kent State, plus stops at TCU and Western Kentucky — and a playing career at Kent State that included an Elite Eight run. He helped guide Utah State to a 51-14 record over two seasons with back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances and a Mountain West regular-season and tournament championship. The 2026 NCAA tournament was his eighth as a coach or player. Uryasz's pitch to him was simple: brand-new facilities, real resources, a fan base that travels, and a program already operating, in football coach Todd Whitten's famous phrase, "first class" in everything. Haut's answer: "We're eager to build a championship-level program that embraces the responsibility of representing this university with competitiveness, toughness, and the grit that reflects both the student body and the Stephenville community."
The Gillispie era ended the way it lived — dramatic to the last. Hired in 2020 to lead the Division I transition, the former Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech coach went 92-89 over six seasons, including a 25-10 breakthrough in 2023-24 that went 16-4 in the WAC. But the 2025-26 season unraveled: Gillispie was placed on administrative leave in October amid an employee review following an anonymous complaint about his coaching style, associate head coach Glynn Cyprien served as acting head coach from mid-January, and the Texans stumbled to a 14-18 finish, 5-13 in the WAC. It was a strange, sad coda for a coach whose teams reached four NCAA tournaments and who won everywhere before the controversies — Texas Tech, the health issues, the player-mistreatment allegations — caught up with him. Texan Nation will remember the 25-win season and the home sweeps of Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin. The program is choosing to remember the momentum, not the mess.
What Haut inherits is a blank slate wearing purple. His 16-man roster for 2026-27 features just four players from last season, eleven transfer-portal acquisitions — the most in the program's seven-year Division I era — and one 2026 high school graduate. Among the returners is Leroy Kelly IV, who announced his return for a sophomore season after showing real promise as a freshman. The non-conference schedule Haut released in September is the most ambitious of the D-I era: a program-record 16 regular-season games plus two exhibitions, split evenly between eight home games and eight road games at the EECU Center, with more than 14,000 miles of travel across five states. "We've put together a schedule that will test us," Haut said, "and have us battle-tested and ready when conference play arrives." Exhibitions open Oct. 18 at East Texas A&M and Oct. 24 at home against Houston Christian.
The setting is part of the story. The EECU Center — the gleaming new arena in Stephenville — is the physical symbol of Tarleton's ambition, and the broader athletic department is on a heater: the football Texans went 12-0 and reached the FCS quarterfinals, have won 30 games in three years, beat FBS Army at West Point in double overtime, and rarely lose a player to the portal thanks to revenue-sharing money that arrived in 2025. Basketball wants the same gravity. The WAC, meanwhile, is in flux across the realignment era, which makes this exactly the right moment for a program with new facilities, new money, and a new coach to make a move. Haut's staff — Jean Prioleau, Jake Williams, Tre Cobbs, Bo Gray — was assembled in weeks and hit the recruiting trail immediately.
None of this guarantees anything, and Haut would be the first to say so. Eleven transfers is a chemistry experiment, not a roster. The WAC road is brutal. And the shadow of the program's Division II glory days — the Lone Star Conference championships, the deep tournament runs — still sets a standard that the Division I version hasn't touched. But there's something undeniably exciting about a program that looked at a 14-18 season and a coaching controversy and decided the answer was to swing bigger: a coach from a Mountain West champion, the most portal talent in program history, the toughest schedule they've ever played. Tarleton State didn't hire Eric Haut to be careful. The new era in Stephenville starts now, and the whole WAC is watching to see what it looks like.