With Tournament hopes in peril, Texas must find its winning spirit
AUSTIN — Texas has mastered the Jekyll-and-Hyde act.
This is a team that can, in the span of minutes, transform from a single-minded unit capable of blitzing Duke into a disjointed collection of torpid individuals that can just as easily surrender a 16-point secondhalf lead.
This frustrating back and forth has lasted all season, and that debilitating personality disorder has seriously imperiled the Longhorns’ NCAA Tournament chances. The latest example arrived Wednesday night.
Just four days earlier, Texas (15-9, 5-6 Big 12) had staged a furious rally to overtake 12th-ranked Oklahoma in the final minutes. Freshman point guard Matt Coleman morphed into the most electric force on the floor during critical stretches late in the game as UT clamped down on OU’s transcendent lead man, Trae Young. The near-capacity crowd, an anomaly at the Erwin Center, flowed with a powerful, transformative energy.
It felt like the team had finally removed the poison and chosen its identity.
Then, UT turned around and squandered a prime résumé-building opportunity against Kansas State — another team working to remove itself from the Tournament bubble. Aside from a 10-0 run in the game’s early portions, the Longhorns played with the type of focus and intensity reserved for an offseason scrimmage.
“There’s going to be a lot of truth and honesty tomorrow when we sit down and watch tape and when we practice,” Smart said. “This league, every game is challenging whether you win or lose. But, that’s what we signed up for. That’s where we are. If a guy wanted to play at a lower level, he should have gone to a lower level. We’ve got to be big boys at understanding that tonight. We didn’t get X, Y and Z done, and those things will be exposed.”
Decisive point
The most painful truth staring at UT is this: It is in real danger of sitting out the Tournament for a second straight season. That hasn’t happened in three decades.
New athletic director Chris Del Conte doesn’t plan to make any coaching moves if UT misses out again, but another hollow season likely would turn the 2018-19 campaign into a litmus test for Smart, whose contract runs through the 2022-23 season and pays out $3 million annually, with bonuses.
Del Conte would also like to have a consistently strong product in place when the new basketball arena is completed a few years from now, though the project will forge ahead regardless of on-court performance.
“It would be difficult for me to go out and say ‘you must win before we build something,’ ” Del Conte said. “That’s not right. We all must help; every Longhorn must help. If you’re not in the theater helping, then you are on the fence criticizing and you’re not doing anything about it.”
Texas can help its cause by securing a road win against TCU on Saturday, followed by a home victory over Baylor on Monday. Both teams will be seeking to pass the Longhorns in the Big 12 race, although UT should be favored in each contest.
Identity crisis
This is a talented collection of players who genuinely care about one another. There isn’t a truly volatile personality among them. Together, they pushed Duke, Gonzaga and Kansas to the brink and beat TCU, Texas Tech and Oklahoma. Mo Bamba is a defensive dynamo anchoring one of the Big 12’s stingiest units, and the cast around him, even without Andrew Jones, is capable of providing sparks on both ends.
But, as Coleman admitted, this team’s spirit fluctuates so violently, not only from day-to-day, but within the span of a single game, that it’s become impossible to predict any outcome. “We didn’t have enough energy going into the game,” he said. “That just comes from within. They wanted it more than us.”
With seven regular-season games remaining, Texas finally has to decide what kind of team it wants to be.