- A fiery speech by interim head coach Rodney Terry helps the Longhorns avoid an upset by Texas Tech on Saturday night.
- Texas Tech coach Mark Adams likes what he sees in the Longhorns because “everybody accepted their role.”
- Dylan Disu represented the essence of a 15-2 Texas team with several key plays in the victory without scoring a point.
When the Texas basketball team somberly filed into the locker room at halftime after yet another dreary first half, Rodney Terry was there with a, well, stirring message.
Apparently a colorful and blunt one, at that.
“Oh yeah,” shooting guard Marcus Carr said of the frank comments, “Coach challenged us for sure. He didn’t like the way we played, and he told us we’re better than that. He wanted us to play like he knows we can play. It was a great halftime speech.”
It must have been because Terry’s players played a great second half. His rhetoric was converted into a spectacular team performance and led to the 10th-ranked Longhorns’ second straight valiant comeback at Moody Center.
Now the fact that they needed a comeback in the first place was a bit jolting, especially on the heels of the escape against TCU and the 116-point beatdown from Kansas State. But Texas fans are growing accustomed to that and gladly settled for a pulsating 72-70 win to survive an upset bid by a winless 0-5 Big 12 team in Texas Tech.
After trailing by 12 in the first half and nine at the break to a Red Raiders team trying to extend their personal Austin win streak to five in a row, the rejuvenated Longhorns took heed of Terry’s remarks. They quit making turnovers, started making better shots, upped their defensive game and rallied around terrific free-throw shooting.
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In the final 20 minutes, Texas made 52% of its shots, all but two of its 15 free-throws and did a much better job of keeping Texas Tech out of the paint where it scored 18 in the first half but only eight in the second.
Terry — the Longhorns’ interim coach — downplayed the significance of his address during intermission, but pushed all the right buttons to get his team to respond and improve to 15-2 on the season on a Saturday when 10 ranked teams fell. Under his guidance, Texas is an impressive 8-1 and tied for second in the Big 12 behind unbeaten Kansas with a 4-1 mark before embarking on a road trip for three of the next four games.
He’s come to realize that, though his inherited club might be imperfect, it’s damn exceptional at crunch time, gives maximum effort and has enough clutch shooters on the perimeter and at the line that they’ll be in every game.
“It’s all about being able to close out those games in the right way. Getting stops. Getting to the foul line at the end of games,” Terry said. “About the eight-minute mark, we start to say it’s winning time right now. Our guys did a really good job of that the last two ballgames.”
Again, he’s not thrilled with bad starts like this one when Texas had as many turnovers (seven) as baskets (seven) late in the first half.
Just as the Longhorns fell behind by 18 to TCU in the opening period on Wednesday before responding and pulling out the win, they came out on fire Saturday by hitting seven of their first 10 shots on a 20-4 run and knotted the game at 44-44 on Jabari Rice’s triple at the 12:37 mark.
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Timmy Allen had a pair of and-one, three-point plays in the second half, Carr sank three of his four treys on the night and Rice was all but Mr. Automatic at the line where he finished with eight free throws, seven after halftime.
Rice, Texas’ invaluable sixth man, has connected on 15 of 17 free throws in the Longhorns’ come-from-behind wins over Texas Tech and TCU this past week.
“They’re one of the best teams in the country,” said Tech’s Jaylon Tyson, who transferred to Lubbock after one semester in Austin and put up 12 points with 14 rebounds Saturday. “It’s not even close. A thousand percent.”
To remain at that level, Terry knows his team must quit starting poorly and needing to dig out of big holes. That will catch up with any team.
Some will make light of a win over a 10-7 Red Raiders team that has yet to win a conference game. But they returned just one starter off last year’s 27-10 Sweet 16 team and are rebuilding with five true freshmen and five transfers.
That includes 6-foot-11 center Fardaws Aimaq, a transfer from Utah State and a prized big man whom Texas tried hard to recruit. Aimaq was playing in his first game in a Tech uniform after sitting out nearly six months with a broken bone in his foot and gave a strong account of himself with 12 points, five rebounds and a three-pointer in 29 minutes on the court.
But it wasn’t enough to overcome a strong-minded Texas team that knows how to get down to business.
“You look at their record and you really couldn’t pay attention to it,” Terry said of Tech, a 3-point loser to No. 3 Kansas. “They easily could have had three (Big 12) wins. My message to our team was they were beating us on the glass and in the paint. We needed to play more assertive and make more decisive plays. We were a little timid to start the game.”
And timid won’t get it done.
What’s wildly optimistic about this Longhorn team is the fact it’s rarely played a complete game in an otherwise terrific season the first two-plus months.
Oh, they took out No. 2 Gonzaga and No. 7 Creighton, but lapses like they’ve had against Kansas State, TCU and Texas Tech could catch up to them.
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The Horns ultimately limited the Red Raiders to 40% shooting and came up with eight blocks and seven steals.
“I think Carr continues to get better,” Tech coach Mark Adams said. “He’s a three-level scorer. Brock Cunningham rebounds and hits open threes. The big guys screen, and guys like Allen are so hard to guard because he’s strong and can score around the basket and off the bounce.
“But everybody on that team accepted their role. They all know what they’re supposed to do.”
That should be the strength of this Texas team even though it hasn’t always consistently showed itself.
Dylan Disu, for example, had a whale of a game for Texas without scoring a single point. During one second-half stretch, the 6-foot-9 senior had one of his four blocks, scrambled and saved a loose ball in a scrum on the floor and took a pivotal charge to end Tech’s surge.
That was as impressive as anything else his teammates did and bodes well for the future.
“I’m still real excited about this team,” Terry said. “We haven’t played our best basketball yet. We want to play our best at the end of February and March. Until then we’ve got to fix things we need to fix.”
Preferably not during a halftime break.
story by The Texas Tribune Source link