RIP HORNS?
Texas men’s basketball season teetering on edge of disaster
Here lies the Texas basketball team. Born Nov. 6.
Died Jan. 17.
Cause of death was unnatural causes.
But the symptoms were a gross lack of leadership in crunch time, a bad case of defensive lapses, a clear shortage of toughness, poor fundamentals and an inability to finish games. Otherwise, the Longhorns were in great health.
Now perhaps the rumors of these Longhorns’ demise are greatly exaggerated and that will bear out over the final 14 games of the season. Or maybe they’re true and this painful 77-71 defeat at the hands of UCF could foretell an early end to a promising season.
The Knights badly outrebounded the Horns by 15 as every one of their players seemed like he was 6-feet-8 with arms longer than flagpoles. Their bench outscored the home team’s reserves 34-7. UCF scored 12 more points in the paint than Texas.
Pure and simple, UCF was the better team in front of a totally exasperated crowd of 11,235 at Moody Center. And, remember, this is a team that just beat mighty Kansas and barely lost to No. 18 BYU.
So what’s wrong?
“I don’t think anything is wrong with us,” said forward Dylan Disu, who has been one of Texas’ most reliable players but had just seven points and again was in foul trouble. “We’ve just got to figure out how to play hard for 40 minutes.”
They better learn fast how to play hard that completely or they’ll hardly be noticed, come March.
Texas has time, but its season is on the cliff’s edge
Texas isn’t listed on anyone’s current 68-team NCAA Tournament field or even one of the last eight teams out by ESPN’s projections. Eight Big 12 teams are penciled in for the moment, but not Texas. And that was before Wednesday night.
The Longhorns were 59th in the
NCAA’s NET list before the game as well. But UCF was 76th.
Rodney Terry, in his first full season as Texas head coach, knows the blame begins with him. He acknowledges that. But he coached one of the most cohesive, tightly knit teams I’ve seen in a long time to the Elite Eight without the play-making Disu the last two games of the year.
But this team with Disu looks rudderless and disconnected at times and a bit fragile mentally. Team leaders like junior point guard Tyrese Hunter, glue guy Brock Cunningham, improving Dillon Mitchell and rock-solid newcomer Max Abmas all share in that responsibility.
Abmas is one of the top scorers and best pure shooters in all of college basketball, but he’s undersized at probably 5-foot-10, defense isn’t his strength and UCF’s longer, taller Knights picked on him and drove past him with three late possessions for buckets in the final four minutes. Hunter mysteriously hasn’t been himself most of the year, and Ithiel Horton hadn’t scored in three Big 12 games until erupting for 20 points in his best game of the year Wednesday while being a willing defender.
“We’ve shown flashes of being really good defensively,” Terry said. “We did it tonight, but not for 40 minutes.”
The last half of the Big 12 schedule will reveal a lot about Texas
The great teams do. Houston comes to town on Jan. 29. The Cougars don’t just play suffocating defense. They don’t let you breathe.
Getting defensive stops in the waning stages of games has been a critical issue with this team, and that falls on everybody in burnt orange. Too often Texas fails to help out, is slow to rotate and on Wednesday the Longhorns weren’t nearly as physical nor had as much want-to as UCF.
In any event, if Terry’s Longhorns aren’t as dead as a doornail, they will show some much-needed life against Baylor on Saturday. And against Oklahoma in Norman next Tuesday. And on the road versus BYU after that. There’s time.
Or they will roll over and maybe qualify for an NIT bid.
The choice is theirs. The talent is there.
But unless they decide to play with more physicality, more grit and more connectivity with their teammates, this season is done.
Texas’ slow Big 12 start leaves plenty of time to fix itself
Texas is an astounding 1-3 in Big 12 play, and the real mystery is how the Longhorns won the one game. In fact, they are one desperation Max Abmas jumper with 6.2 seconds left in Cincinnati
away from being a ghastly 0-4.
As baffling as the horrendous start has been, it’s still relatively early in the conference season. Of course, that’s also the bad news because the Longhorns have yet to play the meat of their schedule. That means games against some of the best teams in the nation because the Big 12 is the premier league in college basketball. Six of the top 20 teams, according to kenpom’s ratings, are Big 12 teams. Nine of the top 30 call this conference home.
But Texas was supposed to be that good, too. There’s no such thing as an off night in the Big 12.
Terry’s crew got picked to finish third in the Big 12, started the season No. 18 in the nation and eventually climbed to No. 12 before this sudden freefall. They led by 16 but fell to the Knights, a team that has been in the NCAA Tournament once since 2005 and five times ever.
Oh, and the Knights were picked to finish dead last in the Big 12. Fourteenth out of 14.
How did that happen? “That’s just someone’s opinion,” said UCF coach Johnny Dawkins, the sage from Duke lineage. “Our guys don’t go off someone’s opinion. They have to put the teams in some kind of order.”
Those opinions belonged to him and his fellow coaches who voted to put UCF last. Of course, Texas has also fallen to the ninth pick, West Virginia, and to the eighth, Texas Tech. Two of the three conference losses have come at home where the Longhorns have lost just three times in their first two seasons in Moody.
And as Dawkins added, “If you’re not getting better, this league will just chew you up.”
Can I get an amen?
Rodney Terry: ‘I’m not a panic guy’
Terry will offer one because he has a deeply spiritual side to him that braces him against adversity, and he isn’t throwing in any towels.
“I’m not a panic guy,” Terry said. “I’ve never been a panic guy because I believe in God. He has a master plan.”
One wonders if some will lose faith in Terry, the calming influence to predecessor Chris Beard’s intensity personified, but it’s way too early for any of that nonsense.
Terry showed he was able to steer this program to prominence when he took over last January and almost led Texas to the Final Four after Beard was dismissed for domestic violence allegations that were later dropped. But now that he is in his first full season at the helm, it’s on him to stop this confounding slide and right the ship.
Terry didn’t seem to have any clear answers Wednesday night, but believes in his team.
“We knew they’d be really physical,” Terry said. “They have size, they’re older. They put their will on us.”
The question is, will Texas fight back?