Texas meeting pressure with a smile
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — This part is supposed to be fun, right?
The NCAA Tournament, three weeks of pure anarchy and conventiondefying performances and unbridled hope, is the reward for all the work unseen. The thousands and thousands of jumpers. The countless film sessions. The sweat-soaked suicides and spine-tingling sessions in the cold tub. The accumulation of blackand-blues and all-over body aches.
Texas seems to understand that. This is a group is basking in the moment, swaddling itself in elation while sapping the will from its opposition. It has the utmost respect for Sunday’s Elite Eight opponent, a fifth-seeded Miami (28-7) team that just dominated top-seeded Houston in a 14-point win, but they’re not going to change now.
And certainly, teams tend have more fun when they keep doing the survive-and-advance thing, but in this case one doesn’t simply lead from the other. The second-seeded Longhorns’ success is intertwined with the joy they play with and exude. Oh, they’ll bury you 8-feet deep, but they’ll do it with a smile and maybe even a little boogie. Just ask Colgate. Or Penn State. Or Sweet 16 victim Xavier.
What Texas (29-8) accomplished Friday night against the third-seeded Musketeers (27-10) at the TMobile Center was remarkable for a number of reasons.
Most obvious, the 83-71 win propelled the Longhorns back into the Elite Eight for the first time in 15 years. But the manner in which they did it, and who they did it without, was the real story, and it’s the reason interim coach Rodney Terry’s unflinching group is still standing amid a field of fallen No. 1s and highmajor letdowns.
Xavier had won its first two tournament games by double-digits behind an elite offense that hummed like a Ferrari and played just as fast. It was a team of veterans with well-defined roles led by coach Sean Miller, a battle-tested tactician who’d won 73 percent of his games across 18 seasons at Xavier and Arizona. And it looked completely helpless against a swashbuckling Texas team that sank a twirling onelegged 3 and a halfcourt heave, that connected on dazzling alley-oops and broke the Musketeers’ spirit with maniacal defensive effort, that overcame the upsetting loss of breakout star forward Dylan Disu (left foot bone bruise) with the eight other rotation players contributing in their own unique ways.
And amid that 40-minute beatdown, it was impossible to overlook how much joy Texas played with.
There was fifth-year senior forward Timmy Allen, paying homage to former Longhorn Lance Blanks’ legendary dance in the immediate aftermath of his halftime buzzerbeater from 47 feet away.
After returning with a walking boot on his tender left foot, Disu slowly rose off his seat and performed a “raise the roof” celebration after super senior forward Christian Bishop hammered a lob from graduate guard Marcus Carr. After Allen flipped a seeing-eye bounce pass through traffic to Bishop for a vicious slam, some Longhorns formed finger glasses to admire the slick feed and finish.
“I don’t like to get too pressed on anything,” Allen said after last week’s second-round win over Penn State. “You can’t trick yourself into being too serious. You got to have fun. And me and Marcus were talking about that last night. We’re blessed. This is our only opportunity here. We’re having fun. And I think y’all can tell.”
Allen said Terry knows just the right time to deliver a couple groan-inducing dad jokes. That bit of levity is critical this time of year, when the swelling pressure can feel suffocating.
“I think he’s conscious of the group we are and how locked in we are and how we don’t always have to be so serious,” Allen said. “Not saying we’re not locked in – we know when there’s a time to play and there’s a time to not. But he trusts us to the point where he can get a joke or two off within our environment and we’re not gonna stray away or start goofing around like we don’t have an objective in front of us.
At the end of the day, it comes down to trust and leadership.”
The Longhorns have rolled right on in the aftermath of that dark December day that saw thencoach Chris Beard arrested. And while they’re not taking this weighty moment lightly, they’re going to have as much fun as possible while chasing the program’s first national title.
“There’s guys in this room that have lived a lot outside of basketball and played a lot of basketball as well,” graduate guard Brock Cunningham said Saturday. “We go down against Penn State a couple points, some teams would freeze up and the moment would be too big, but we’ve got big time players that are able to get the game back. We’re just having a lot of fun playing with each other. We don’t want it to end, and we want this season to go all the way.”