page_title: Texas Longhorns men's basketball
section_title: 1914–27
hierarchical_section_title: Texas Longhorns men's basketball / History / The early years (1906–36) / 1914–27
caption_attribution_description: English: Berry Whittaker
context_page_description: The Texas Longhorns men's basketball team represents The University of Texas at Austin in NCAA Division I intercollegiate men's basketball. The Longhorns currently compete in the Big 12 Conference.
  The University of Texas began varsity intercollegiate competition in men's basketball in 1906. The Longhorns rank 18th in total victories among all NCAA Division I college basketball programs and 25th in all-time win percentage among programs with at least 60 years in Division I, with an all-time win-loss record of 1791–1088. Among Big 12 Conference men's basketball programs, Texas is second only to Kansas in both all-time wins and all-time win percentage.
  The Longhorns have won 27 total conference championships in men's basketball and have made 34 total appearances in the NCAA Tournament, reaching the NCAA Final Four three times and the NCAA Regional Finals seven times. As of the end of the 2017–18 season, Texas ranks sixth among all Division I men's basketball programs for total NCAA Tournament games won without having won the national championship, trailing Kansas State, Notre Dame, Purdue, Illinois, and Oklahoma.
context_section_description: L. Theo Bellmont, the first Athletic Director at The University of Texas—and a man instrumental in the formation of the Southwest Conference—took the reins as head coach from 1914 to 1915, for the first of his two stints leading the basketball team, and directed the Longhorns to 11–0 and 14–0 records in the 1914 and 1915 seasons, respectively, as well as the inaugural Southwest Conference championship during the latter season. Bellmont's teams contributed 25 victories to a winning streak that would ultimately grow to 44 games.
  After his teams extended the UT winning streak to 28 games, Bellmont stepped away from coaching to focus on his work as athletic director and appointed Roy Henderson to the still-unpaid Texas basketball head coaching position. Henderson's team recorded Texas' third consecutive undefeated season in 1916 to extend the total to 40 consecutive victories. Senior center Clyde Littlefield, the linchpin of the three consecutive undefeated teams—and a towering figure in UT athletics history who would later coach the football team for seven seasons (1927–33), serve as the head coach of the UT track team from 1925 to 1960 (winning 25 conference championships), and found the Texas Relays—would later receive retroactive recognition as Texas' first consensus All-American in basketball for his play in the 1916 season.
  UT alumnus and former regent Thomas Watt Gregory had begun campaigning a decade earlier for the construction of a permanent gymnasium for the benefit of the student body and faculty—one in which the basketball team would be able to play and practice as well—but fundraising for the $75,000 project had lagged, even more so with Gregory's departure from Austin to serve as the U.S. Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson in 1914. The project was shelved, but the need remained acute, and, following the 1916 season, the UT Athletic Council decided to allocate $8,500 for the construction of the temporary and rudimentary all-wood Men's Gym, which was finished for the second game of the next season.
   
  Theo Bellmont hired Eugene Van Gent from Missouri in 1916 to lead the Texas football, basketball, and track programs. Van Gent's single basketball team at Texas recorded a 13–3 overall mark and won the Southwest Conference championship for the third consecutive year, with the season highlighted by the first-ever basketball games between Texas and the Texas A&M Aggies, following the resumption of athletic relations between the two schools. The Longhorns began the basketball rivalry with wins in both home games and in one of two games in College Station. Van Gent's 1917 Texas team also added the final four wins to the Texas winning streak that had begun in 1913 before suffering a 24–18 loss to Rice in Austin. Texas' winning streak stood as the NCAA record for consecutive wins in men's basketball for almost 40 years (until Phil Woolpert's Bill Russell-led San Francisco teams won 60 consecutive games from 1955 to 1957), and the achievement today remains the fifth-longest winning streak in Division I history. Van Gent departed after coaching for one season in each sport—winning the conference championship in both—to join the military following the United States' entry into the First World War in April 1917.
  Following Van Gent's single year as head coach, Roy Henderson returned to coach Texas for two additional seasons. With several players from the 1917 team having left for military service, the 1918 Longhorn basketball team had only one returning player in sophomore Al DeViney. Henderson scouted talent in the intramural ranks and nonetheless assembled a team that finished 14–5 overall and missed winning Texas' fourth consecutive SWC championship by a single game. Henderson guided the Longhorns to a 17–3 overall record in his final season (1919), splitting the four-game series with the second-place Aggies to win the SWC championship—Texas' fourth basketball conference championship during the five years the conference had existed.
   
  From 1910 through 1919, Texas recorded an overall winning percentage of .789. Only thre
caption: Berry Whitaker
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