- Acting head coach Rodney Terry’s fiery speech helps the Longhorns avoid loss to Texas Tech on Saturday night.
- Texas Tech coach Mark Adams likes what he sees in the Longhorns because “everyone has accepted their role.”
- Dylan Disu epitomized a 15-2 Texas team, with several key games in a no-point victory.
When the Texas basketball team sullenly entered the locker room at halftime after another dismal first half, Rodney Terry was there with a moving message.
Apparently colorful and blunt, in this one.
“Oh yeah,” shooting guard Marcus Carr said of the candid comments, “the coach definitely challenged us. He didn’t like the way we played and he said we were better. He wanted us to play the way he knows we can play. It was a great halftime speech.”
It must be because Terry’s men had a great second half. His rhetoric turned into a thrilling team performance and led to a second straight 10th-seeded Longhorns comeback to the Moody Center.
Now the fact that they needed to come back was a bit of a shock, especially after a run from TCU and a 116-point beating from Kansas State. But Texas fans are getting used to it and happily settled for a throbbing 72-70 win to survive the Big 12 team’s upset 0-5 winless bid at Texas Institute of Technology.
After trailing 12 in the first half and nine at halftime as the Red Raiders struggled to extend their personal winning streak in Austin to five in a row, the rejuvenated Longhorns heeded Terry’s remarks. They stopped making turnovers, got better shots, improved their defense and rallied around amazing free throws.
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In the last 20 minutes, Texas hit 52% of their shots, all but two of their 15 free throws, and did a much better job of keeping Texas Tech from hitting the paint, hitting 18 in the first half and only eight in the second. second.
Terry, the Longhorns’ interim coach, downplayed his performance during the break but pushed all the right buttons for his team to respond and improve to a 15-2 record for the season on Saturday when 10 teams in the rankings fell. Under his leadership, Texas put up an impressive 8-1 record and tied for second place in the Big 12 behind undefeated Kansas at 4-1 before heading out to three of the next four games.
He concluded that while his legacy stick may not be perfect, it is exceptional as hell at the crucial moment, gives maximum effort, and has enough clutch shooters on the perimeter and on the line that every game will have.
“It’s all about finishing those games right. Getting stops. We get to the foul line at the end of games,” Terry said. “As far as the eight-minute mark, we are starting to say that now is the time to win. Our guys did really well in the last two games.”
Again, he’s not thrilled with bad starts like this, where Texas had as many losses (seven) as they had baskets (seven) at the end of the first half.
Just as the Longhorns were 18 behind TCU in the first period on Wednesday before calling back for the win, they fired up on Saturday, landing seven of their first 10 shots at 20-4 to finish the game at 44. -44 on Jabari Rice’s trio at 12:37.
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Timmy Allen had two and one 3-point plays in the second half, Carr hit three of his four 3-pointers on the night, and Rice was barely a Mr. Automaton on the line, where he finished with eight free throws, seven after the break.
Rice, Texas’ invaluable sixth man, hit 15 of 17 free throws in the Longhorns’ victory over Texas Tech and TCU last week.
“This is one of the best teams in the country,” said Tech’s Jalon Tyson, who moved to Lubbock after one semester in Austin and scored 12 points on 14 rebounds on Saturday. “It’s not even close. One thousand percent.
To stay at this level, Terry knows that his team must stop starting badly and digging big holes. Which will catch up with any team.
Some take it lightly to beat the Red Raiders 10-7, who have yet to win a conference. But they brought back just one player from last year’s Sweet 16 team 27-10 and are rebounding with five real freshmen and five transfers.
Among them are the 6-foot-11 center Fardows Aimak, a transfer from Utah, and a prized big man that Texas has struggled to recruit. Aimak played in his first game in Tech uniform after sitting out with a broken bone in his leg for almost six months, and performed well with 12 points, five rebounds and a 3-pointer in 29 minutes on the court.
But that wasn’t enough to defeat a strong Texas team that knows how to hit the ground running.
“You look at their track record and you really can’t look at it,” Terry said of Tech losing by 3 points to Kansas No. 3. “They could easily get three (Big 12) wins. My message to our team was that they hit us on glass and paint. We needed to play more assertively and play more decisively. We were a little shy when we started the game.”
And the timid will not do it.
What is wildly optimistic about this Longhorn team is the fact that during the first two-plus months they rarely played to the fullest in a terrific season.
Oh, they took out Gonzaga #2 and Creighton #7, but mistakes like the ones they had against Kansas State, TCU, and Texas Tech could make up for them.
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Ultimately, the Horns limited the Red Raiders to 40% shooting and achieved eight blocks and seven interceptions.
“I think Carr continues to get better,” technical coach Mark Adams said. “He is a scorer with three levels. Brock Cunningham rebounds and scores open threes. The big guys screen and guys like Allen are very hard to guard because he is strong and can score both around the basket and off the rebound.
“But everyone on this team accepted their role. They all know what they have to do.”
This should be the strength of this Texas team, although it has not always shown itself consistently.
Dylan Disu, for example, played a whale game for Texas without scoring a single point. During one second half, the 6’9 senior got one of his four blocks, climbed up and saved a loose ball in a floor scramble, and landed the takedown to end Tech’s forays.
It was as impressive as everything else his teammates have done and bodes well for the future.
“I’m still in awe of this team,” Terry said. “We haven’t shown our best basketball yet. We want to show our best at the end of February and March. Until then, we must fix what we need to fix.”
Preferably not during a break.
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