Asked, answered
Hot-shooting Bears able to quickly diffuse any challenge Longhorns throw their way
AUSTIN — Baylor looks like a team that’s going to scale a ladder and snip a net in Indianapolis a couple months from now.
That premise won’t be confirmed or refuted until April 5, the date of this season’s NCAA championship game, but No. 2 Baylor performed like the king-in-waiting again Tuesday night, absorbing all No. 6 Texas could muster and countering with more of everything. More 3pointers. More steals and deflections. More hustle plays. More of all those things that go into winning, including, most importantly, getting buckets.
Baylor’s 83-69 win over fullstrength Texas at the Erwin Center was further confirmation that coach Scott Drew’s crew is the class of the Big 12 in 2021. Not even Texas coach Shaka Smart would dispute that notion after witnessing the Bears’ devastating machine up close.
“I told those guys that Bay
lor’s ahead of us right now. That’s a fact,” Smart said after the game.
If there’s an Achilles heel hiding somewhere beneath the Bears’ armor, no one has gotten close enough to discover it. The Longhorns poked and prodded all evening, scanning for a way to slow Baylor.
Texas (11-4, 5-3 Big 12) did, at times, make inroads as the aggressor. It responded to Baylor’s opening 8-0 run with a 10-2 spurt of its own. When Baylor (17-0, 9-0) shrugged off that retort with a 10-0 run, the Longhorns recalibrated and let redshirt junior guard Andrew Jones take control.
Jones (career-high 25 points) dipped into his bag of tricks, twirling for fadeaway jumpers, maneuvering through defenders for layups and knocking down 3s, keeping Texas in striking distance. The arena’s sprinkling of fans thundered when senior big Jericho Sims spun and soared for a ferocious dunk and senior guard Matt Coleman knocked down a 3 to cut Baylor’s lead to 38-34 late in the first half.
But Baylor had an answer, a theme on this night. Bears guard Davion Mitchell (27 points) rose up and buried a 3 in Jones’ face before the buzzer. It was one of 11 Baylor 3s on the night, with Mitchell and guard Jared Butler (21 points) combining for eight
Not even Greg Brown’s atomic detonation on the rim in the second half went in the Longhorns’ favor. The Texas freshman drew a technical foul for standing over and staring down at the Bear he turned into a dunk contest prop, forward Jonathan Tchamwa Tchatchoua, allowing Baylor to extend its lead from 55-51 to 59-51 after two made free throws and a Mitchell layup.
Baylor outscored Texas 28-18 and shot 12-for-18 from the moment of Brown’s technical to the end of the game, a span of 13 minutes.
“It’s a huge teaching moment.
It just can’t happen,” Smart said. “When you have a big-time dunk like that, it really injects energy into your team and into anyone supporting Texas in the building. When there’s a technical, that momentum goes the other way. And obviousl, they were able to snowball that into a big lead that we were never able to overcome.”
Texas isn’t going to beat Baylor when allowing it to shoot 59 percent, as it did Tuesday night. No team is.
And with Baylor sniping away at 52.4 percent from behind the arc, the Longhorns had little chance at making a second-half comeback bid last.
The Longhorns spent most of the night scrambling on defense, both trying to contest shooters around the arc and heading off forays into the paint by Mitchell or another crafty Bears guard. When they took one facet away, Baylor just utilized other methods of scoring.
The Bears produced 20 points off 17 Texas turnovers, committing only four themselves in the second half, and complemented the blistering outside shooting with 16 layups or dunks. Texas wasn’t as prolific or versatile with its scoring, especially after Brown’s energy-swinging technical.
Coleman and backcourt mate Courtney Ramey Brown struggled with the dogged pressure and physicality of Baylor’s supersized wings. Brown and sophomore big Kai Jones never settled into a rhythm, finishing with a combined nine points, four rebounds, three turnovers and two blocks. And no one could hit a free throw — Texas shot 3-for-14, including 2 of 10 in the second half.
All those problems compounded as the night went on, making it so that even after Texas shot 55 percent from the field and 45.5 percent from 3-point range, it couldn’t finish within 10 of Baylor in the state’s first matchup with both teams ranked in the Associated Press Top 10.
“Now they’re (Baylor) ahead of a lot of people, but that gives us one option if we want to be able to beat teams like that later in the year. And that is get better,” Smart said. “And that’s been a focus over the last two days, when we’ve kind of got back whole as a group, is that we flat out have to get better in a lot of areas.”