For those who have followed Texas Longhorns’ basketball over the past two seasons, you likely have a 50/50 chance of knowing who sophomore guard Damarcus Croaker is.
Croaker came in last season as a four-star recruit from Orlando, Fla., but with a logjam of experience and more polished young talent in the Longhorns’ backcourt, he never really got a true opportunity to find his place within the program.
With the majority of his time being spent on the bench, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Croaker has decided to leave Texas and pursue his collegiate basketball career elsewhere.
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It’s always unfortunate when a young talented player decides to take their talents to another program, but with a Texas backcourt that already features tons of talent with guys like Isaiah Taylor, Javan Felix and Demarcus Holland, along with two more highly-skilled guards coming as freshmen next season, the Longhorns shouldn’t experience too many negative side-effects from Croaker’s departure.
After contributing only 3.3 points and 0.9 rebounds per game as a freshman, Croaker’s point production nearly cut in half this season, as he’s averaged only 1.6 points per game in his 47 total minutes in the five of the Longhorns’ 10 games he did make an appearance in.
In those five games, Croaker has knocked down only three of his 10 attempts from the field, which explains why he’s contributed only eight points this entire season.
While Croaker will likely garner some attention from various programs, such as Murray State, whom he committed to prior to deciding to be a Longhorn instead, the Texas backcourt will be looking to fill what miniscule role Croaker played with his 9.4 minutes per game with more court time for guys like Kendal Yancy and Jordan Barnett.
Despite the Longhorns’ frontcourt getting all of the recognition this season, the Texas backcourt is quite loaded as well, and Croaker often isn’t thought of in that group of guys featuring Taylor, Felix and Holland.
When Taylor went out early in the season against Iowa with a wrist injury, it appeared as a potential opportunity for Croaker to prove his worth, but he’s since failed to see the court in five of the Longhorns’ eight games.
Taylor is now set to return in a couple weeks, which will congest the playing time in the backcourt even further, which would have pointed to Croaker riding the pine until his junior season.
But unfortunately for Croaker, the commitments of four-star combo guards Eric Davis and Kerwin Roach means an even more crowded backcourt that could return Taylor and Felix.
With Davis being a flat-out scorer and Roach having a very similar play style to Croaker, he’d find himself competing for limited minutes with freshmen, and quite possibly playing no more than five or six minutes per night.
But this just goes to show that the Longhorns’ backcourt is going to be perfectly fine without Croaker. Yes, he’s a fine talent that will make an impact somewhere, but the Longhorns are back to national prominence and that can be seen in their tremendous depth, which will be the case again next season.
In reality, the only way this transfer will hurt Texas is simply having one less athletic body to go against in practice, and the benefits of more minutes for more impactful players goes down as just another reason the Longhorns won’t miss a beat without Croaker.