It feels like a long time ago now, but it was just the 2022-23 season when Chris Beard had Texas basketball playing like a championship contender before he was fired in January following an arrest for a felony domestic violence charge. Now, after two years of Rodney Terry leading the program, Sean Miller is at the helm, and it’s clear he has things heading back in the right direction.
A trip to the Sweet 16 signaled good things to come, and a strong performance in the Transfer Portal this offseason was an even clearer indicator. Dailyn Swain’s draft selection as the No. 15 overall pick of the 2026 NBA Draft on Tuesday night is icing on the cake.
Dailyn Swain may become a key piece of Sean Miller’s recruiting pitch
Swain was a developmental project for Miller, following him from Xavier, where he spent his first two years of college. The 6-foot-7 playmaker certainly benefited from the lack of wing talent in this year’s NBA Draft, a quirk for such a deep and talented class. Still, his ability to rise up from an 11-point per game scorer in 2025-25 at Xavier to a 17-point scorer, second-team All-SEC performer, and top-15 NBA Draft pick under Miller is a great sign for Texas.
Miller is already recruiting well out of high school. How could he not with Texas’s resources? He’s added five-star small forward Austin Goosby as the headliner of a four-player 2026 class that ranked No. 6 in the country.
His portal efforts are just as strong, bringing in David Punch, Isaiah Johnson, Amari Evans, Elyjah Freeman, and Mikey Lewis this offseason. Could those efforts get even stronger in future years after Miller proved he can turn a talented project like Swain into a first-round pick? It’s hard to imagine it would hurt his recruiting case.
Tre Johnson just went No. 6 overall in the 2025 draft, so it’s not like Texas hasn’t produced NBA talent in recent years. But, there’s a significant difference between a five-star talent like Johnson holding his spot in the one-and-done hierarchy for a year in college and a player like Swain, who ranked outside the top 100 in the 2023 class, growing into a star.
He did it, too, without his jump-shot fully coming along. That's how tantalizing his potential is in the NBA, that he's not an entirely finished product and he's still worth the No. 15 pick. Nobody felt that way about him two years ago, however.
The ability to develop smaller-school underrecruited talent into an NBA draft pick has always been a valuable skill set for a coach. In the Transfer Portal era, though, it can be everything because there is so much untapped talent on the open market every offseason. Identifying it and developing it is the biggest challenge and the biggest key to winning in modern college basketball. That’s what Miller did with Swain, and that’s the message Miller just sent every prospective Texas recruit or Texas transfer on Tuesday night.
Swain certainly isn't the first draft pick Miller has produced. He helped DeAndre Ayton become the No. 1 overall pick in 2018, and Derrick Williams go No. 2 overall in 2011. Swain is the first first-rounder during his Texas tenure, though, and likely won't be the last.
Add us as a preferred source on Google