There's a number that tells you everything about UT Arlington basketball: 0-28. That was the Mavericks' record against ranked opponents entering December 2016 — 0-28, stretching back to February 1967. Then Scott Cross's team walked into McKeon Pavilion in Moraga, California, and did the unthinkable: a 65-51 dismantling of No. 12 Saint Mary's, holding the Gaels to 31.4 percent shooting. A week earlier they'd gone into Austin and beaten Texas. Kevin Hervey scored 15 against the Gaels, guard Erick Neal added 13 points and eight assists, and the 27-win team that followed — Sun Belt regular-season champions, 27-9, a quarterfinal run in the NIT with wins over BYU and Akron at a packed College Park Center — remains the gold standard of UTA basketball. Everything since has been measured against that magical winter.
The current era belongs to K.T. Turner, now entering his fourth season, and it's being built the hard way. Turner arrived in March 2023 from Kentucky, where he'd been an assistant under John Calipari, and inherited a program that had cycled through three coaches since the Cross era's controversial end. His third season, 2025-26, finished 18-14 with a 9-9 WAC mark — a workmanlike campaign defined by roster churn and staff continuity. Turner brought back all five full-time assistants (Sean Stout, Keith Pickens, Jeremy Pope, Cody San Miguel and Derrick Obasohan), and they did it with just two returning scholarship players from the year before. Eleven new faces, eight via the transfer portal, and the Mavericks still finished above .500.
The engine of that team was Raysean Seamster, the senior forward who averaged 15.1 points and 6.5 rebounds and earned a preseason All-WAC nod. Beside him, Marcell McCreary chipped in 12.2 a night, and Arkansas transfer point guard Cash Chavis — seven assists in the season opener, a 91-40 demolition — took the reins of an offense that has always wanted to share the ball. In Turner's first UTA season, the Mavericks ranked second in the WAC in assists per game at 14.1; the identity is unselfish basketball with Texas-tough defense. Freshmen Jordan Lowery (Denton Guyer) and Amari Reed (Lancaster) arrived with championship pedigree — both led their high school teams to Texas state titles — and sophomores like Cameron Jackson plus wings Bahsil Laster, Tyran Mason, Marcus Rigsby Jr. and Jayden Smoot gave Turner a deep, switchable rotation.
The season had its scars. Two straight overtime games in late January and early February — an 87-77 loss to California Baptist on Jan. 31, then a double-overtime 87-84 heartbreaker at Utah Tech five days later — summed up a year of near-misses. It was the first time UTA had played two OT games in a week since 2011, and the Mavericks now own a 50-47 record across 97 all-time overtime games. The WAC itself was a seven-team scrum in 2025-26 — Utah Valley, California Baptist and Utah Tech setting the pace at the top — with the conference tournament back at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas. In that kind of league, Turner's team was competitive on any given night and a bad matchup on others; the next step is turning 18 wins into 22 and a tournament final.
That's because the tournament is the ghost that haunts this program. UT Arlington has made the NCAA Division I tournament exactly once — in 2008, as a 16-seed that ran into top-seeded Memphis. Cross built the program's modern identity across 12 seasons and 225 wins — the most in school history — guiding the Mavericks from the Southland to the WAC to the Sun Belt, winning Southland Coach of the Year in 2012 and Sun Belt Coach of the Year in 2017. And then, stunningly, he was fired in March 2018, two days after a 21-13 season, with AD Jim Baker citing "new leadership and energy." The mid-major world howled. Chris Ogden followed (2018-21), then Greg Young (2021-23), fired midseason, before Turner's hire. The Cross firing remains the dividing line in program history: everything after has been a search for what was lost.
What was never lost is College Park Center. Opened in 2012, the 7,000-seat arena in the heart of Arlington is one of the WAC's best game-night environments, and the 2017 NIT run — Akron beaten 85-69 in front of 5,390, Cal State Bakersfield falling just short 76-80 with 6,336 roaring — showed what the building becomes when the Mavericks matter. The program's first season was 1959-60, and the trophy case holds the 2008 Southland tournament title, the 2011-12 Southland regular-season crown (24-9, NIT), the 2015-16 CIT run (24-11), and the 2016-17 Sun Belt banner. Kevin Hervey, the 2017 Sun Belt Player of the Year, remains the program's modern icon.
Turner is 35 years removed from the playground in spirit and exactly the right age in experience: a coach who learned under Calipari's star-driven machine and is now building a program-first one. The WAC has shrunk to seven teams and the path to March runs through Las Vegas in March. The Mavericks' share-the-ball identity, the returning culture pieces, the freshman champions — it's all pointed at one thing. The 2016-17 team taught Arlington what the ceiling looks like. Turner's job, entering year four, is to finally break through it.