Horns escape with a win in Big 12 opener
Heading into Saturday’s Big 12 opener against Oklahoma, Texas hadn’t dropped a game with acting head coach Rodney Terry suddenly shepherding a team that fancies itself a national championship contender.
Texas needed overtime to beat an on-fire Rice squad on Dec. 12, just hours after second-year coach Chris Beard was suspended indefinitely. Stanford pushed the Longhorns a couple weeks ago at the American Airlines Center before they pulled away to win by 10. Texas won its other two games under Terry by a combined 53 points.
The streak nearly ended in Texas’ first true road game. Graduate transfer guard Sir’Jabari Rice and the rest of the team’s veterans did everything within their power to keep it intact.
Rice, fifth-year guard Marcus Carr and fifth-year forward Timmy Allen turned it on in winning time, willing the Longhorns (12-1, 1-0 Big 12) to a 70-69 triumph over archrival Oklahoma (9-4, 0-1) on New Year’s Eve.
“All credit to my teammates tonight and my coaches,” Rice told the Longhorn Radio Network after scoring all 11 of his points in the second half. “They just kept telling me, ‘Shoot the ball, shoot the ball.’ Obviously, went 0-fer in the first half but my teammates kept pushing me to shoot the ball, me and Marcus.”
This was a grinding game, the sort of slowpaced slugfest Oklahoma prefers to play. It entered this contest ranked 337th out of 363 Division I teams in possessions per 40 minutes, and the Sooners dictated that sort of plodding tempo for most of the afternoon.
Texas scored its points in little spurts rather than a steady stream. Its transition opportunities were often cut off. Its treks to the rim were often rebuffed on the perimeter or thwarted by a tangle of bodies in the paint. A couple of its firsthalf possessions ended not with a shot but with a shotclock violation.
Meanwhile, OU leading scorer Grant Sherfield was putting on a clinic, hitting baseline fall-away jumpers and slithery layups throughout a 16-point first half. At halftime, Oklahoma led 35-31.
The rest of the Sooners weren’t exactly breezing to buckets, though. And once Texas put the clamps on Sherfield in the second half — he finished with 22 points on 9 of 19 shooting — it was able to make a run.
“They had a one-man wrecking crew going there for a while,” Terry said of Sherfield. “You know, we always try to say we don’t want the best player to beat us. We needed to really make a conscious effort to have a really good team guard on him as well as an individual guard. And I thought our guys buckled down and did that.”
Texas embarked on a 10-1 scoring run to seize a 46-44 lead that would switch hands a few more times down the stretch of a white-knuckle finish.
Allen (13 points) handled the bulk of the scoring early in the second half, hitting Oklahoma with a flurry of turnaround jumpers and physical finishes. Carr (13 points) also sank some critical jumpers three days after his 41point outing against Texas A&M-Commerce.
With about six minutes remaining, Rice took control.
The newcomer from New Mexico State sent one defender flying with a convincing shot fake and soared in for a one-handed dunk to knot the game at 55-55. On Texas’ ensuing possession, Rice buried a turnaround 15-footer with a defender draped all over him. He baited another defender into fouling him on a 3-pointer and hit every free throw to tie the game once more.
Sherfield scooped in a layup with 67 seconds left, only his second field goal of the half, but Carr answered with a contested turnaround hook shot in the lane. After Texas forced maybe the biggest stop of its season to this point, Oklahoma had to foul. And it kept fouling the wrong Longhorn.
Rice hit four straight free throws down the stretch, finishing a prefect 7-for-7 from the line. Carr hit two more freebies with three seconds left.
And Texas needed every single one since Oklahoma guard Jacob Groves banked in a 3 as time expired. “We practice those type of things every day, pressure free throws,” Rice said. “Just being in the moment, being a veteran, being able to lock in on your free throw and not worry about nothing else, just the rim of the ball. I feel like we work on that 1,000 times a day.
Rice added: “Coach always tells us that you shoot the shots now in practice, so when you get to the game, you earned the right to make the free throws. Tonight I did.”