COVID is starting to wreak havoc on sports schedules again, and as such the Longhorns had to scramble to replace their second-highest rated noncon home game of the season (Rice….seriously, it was Rice) on the fly. Chris Beard opened up his Rolodex - Zoomers: imagine your Instagram DMs were made out of piece of paper and connected to a metal circle on your desk and it made this glorious ASMR spinny-flippy sound when you scrolled through the paper cards looking for a name & phone number - to find yet another SWAC team to demolish, landing on Alabama State in his unending quest to sell tickets to fans who don’t read the opponent names closely enough. What was already a fairly poor remaining noncon schedule got that much worse, and here we are with a schedule that is worse than 8 other Big 12 schools (Tech is still worse, that Beard coaching tree is working its magic in Lubbock). Cheers all around, everybody.

We talked in the latest Pretend We’re Football episode about the rotation decisions being made by Beard & staff and the end result is neither of us really gets what they’re trying to do here. It seems as if they’re trying to send a message to various players by planting Marcus Carr on the bench - and starting Andrew Jones who previously thrived in the 6th-man role - but I’m not sure why that meant putting Tristen Licon into the game at the U16 timeout. It’s one thing to start Devin Askew as a way to see if he’s better able to handle point guard duties than Carr has been to date, that’s a reasonable thing to tinker with in a game with an overmatched opponent; it’s another thing entirely to give Licon significant run at a point in time when it’s not clean-up duty and you have a handful of players (like Jaylon Tyson) who are more important to the long-term future of this team. Licon got subbed out for Jase Febres. That means Licon was higher on the rotation than Febres & Brock, and Licon was subbed in a couple minutes later for Jones. It doesn’t really matter in the context of this one game, but in the larger scope I’m wondering if Beard is throwing shit against a wall right now in an attempt to make the offense less anemic.

Arkansas Pine Bluff scored one point in the first 10+ minutes and didn’t hit a shot until 12 minutes of game time had passed. Some of that was Texas playing stifling defense, some of it was UAPB being terrible. They hit a three to make it 18-5, which is a great score if there are 5 minutes gone in a game, but Texas is determined to keep this Jeep in low gear regardless of the terrain. This game was never in doubt.

Disu entered the game and nearly immediately erased a Golden Lions shot; he looks pretty healthy and decisive so this is hopefully a fairly quick transition to him getting significant minutes in conference play. He looks more explosive than anyone else on the team, which might be damning with faint praise. Beggars/choosers though, am I right?

Harrison Ingram is a good high-major player who Texas went after under the previous coach and Stanford has a couple of other pieces which could turn into something down the road, but their talent level is nowhere near Texas or the top of the PAC 12. They stayed within striking distance of Texas due to Ingram and a ton of offensive rebounds - stop me if hearing a Texas opponent rebounding 33% of their misses rings a bell - but once Texas decided in the second half to keep the ball out of Ingram’s hands the game was effectively over. Stanford is without guys who can get their own shot and Ingram’s a freshman who isn’t yet to the point where he can get himself free to get the ball against a team actively denying him the ball, and that manifested itself in Stanford scoring 8 points in the first 9 minutes of the second half. To wit:

This is the second time in two games against teams with a pulse where Texas went 7+ minutes without doing much in the second half; it cost them dearly against Seton Hall and made for a disheartening graphic during Stanford:

On one hand, you give Texas credit for being good enough defensively to make an 8-0 run over 7+ minutes notable but not a death knell for the first win of the season away from home. On the other hand, you let a Stanford squad who is ranked ~30 spots worse in defensive efficiency than the worst Big 12 team and who let both Baylor and San Jose State crack 86+ points keep you scoreless for 1/3 of the second half. I know the efficiency numbers say this offense is doing well, but I’ve made my feelings known on how reliant it is on turnovers and they’re already having significant droughts against teams who don’t defend like the Big 12 does. They pass up too many open looks as it is, and once conference play starts those open looks are going to diminish in quantity.

This game was in Vegas and it felt like somebody got hold of the refs and told them they would get a share of a million-dollar payoff if they kept the game under two hours; the first half they let a ton of contact go, refused to call some obvious fouls, and missed at least one player stepping out of bounds. It didn’t seem to benefit either side a ton, it was just sloppy as hell. It’s as if the refs were as disinterested in being there as Texas & Stanford fans, there might have been 250 people in attendance if you include the teams. On the bright side, playing during a 19th century British wake meant Bill Walton had to dial it down about 50%. He still complained about anything that went against the PAC 12 team because Walton gonna Walton, but he did it at half his normal volume and dialed his schtick down the same amount. So instead of getting MegaWalton where he shoehorned bits into the game whenever he could, we got the Walton from his early days doing PAC 12 games where the weirdness was organic and in the rhythm of the game; he talked about a Ken Burns documentary, referenced a pro French cyclist for no reason at all, and kept calling his co-host “the desert fox”. It was actually delightful for once.

Texas was down 16-4 at one point, and it wasn’t until 1:05 left in the game that Texas got their first lead. Things got relatively back to normal in the second half - Alabama State kept fighting and had it down to a single possession early in the half, but eventually faded - but there was a moment or two along the way when Texas flirted with disaster.

This game is tight until the end if Disu isn’t playing; he was the best player on the floor today, his 12 points, 4 rebounds, and three blocks were maybe the difference between Texas winning and losing today.

It feels weird to say “I hope he’s injured” because I don’t really want a Texas player to be injured, but Ramey only played 4 minutes and zero of them were in the second half. If that was due to injury, things make a lot more sense than if it was Beard sitting a guy he should be trying to ramp up for conference play. I “hope” it wasn’t something else, because pretty much every other answer is bad news.

This felt like a lot better point before Texas actually started playing today.

When was the last time you remember seeing Texas guards reliably finish strong at the rim? It seems like most of them are either driving to somewhere outside the low-post for a pull-up jumper (mostly Ramey) or going for a floater just inside the free throw line (mostly Carr, though there are others). More to the point, they’re driving into the paint less frequently overall. As an example, here are the Synergy stats for ISO situations. Last season Marcus Carr drove the ball in ISO situations a shade under 2 times per game (56 in 29 games); this year he’s driving much less often, 12 times in 10 games, or 1.2 per game. Courtney Ramey took it to the basket in PnR situations nearly 39% of the time last season, this season he’s down to 25%. We could probably look at these numbers for all of the higher-usage guards and see a similar lack of focus on getting to the rim. I’d like to see Texas work in some wrinkles similar to Gonzaga - who wouldn’t - where the bigs go in to create a post position but really what they’re doing is setting up an off-ball screen to create space for a driving guard. Texas got burned a number of times by Timme walling off his defender, it’s a fairly simple concept that could help the offense get some layups and would create a downside for teams trying to front Mitchell/Allen/Disu when they’re discouraging post entry feeds. Also, getting to the rim against aggressive defenses like the no-middle scheme Texas will face several times opens up skip passes and feeding weakside bigs when the defense commits to the driving guard. Get to the tin, young fellas; good things will result.

Against UAPB & Stanford, Texas combined to go 10/36 from three (27.78%), if you add in the Seton Hall loss and the Alabama State win it’s 18/74 (24.32%). It could be a four-game lull in an otherwise good year from deep, but it bears monitoring because Texas is about to start playing a bunch of teams which won’t let guys like Allen & Mitchell score easily in the paint, so the threes need to fall at a higher clip than they have lately. That sound you hear in the distance is Tim Preston screaming about passing up open looks, and he’s right. Texas guards need to look to score more than they have been, and that means letting it fly when you’re open.

It appears teams have enough film on Texas at this point to make a decision on Allen, most notably that they’re doubling him aggressively when he’s not in the low block. They’re gambling that he won’t reliably be able to pass out of the double-team when he’s either at the free throw line extended or on the perimeter in the outer third of the court. It’s up to him to recognize this situation as it happens; sometimes he does, and it will behoove the coaches to raise this issue if they haven’t already.

Texas is a little over a week from conference play and their rotation is still largely random. Allen, Mitchell, and Ramey are likely starters in any given game pending a fully healthy Disu, but beyond that the coaching staff seems like they haven’t figured much of anything else out. I can only speculate as to what’s going on behind the scenes, but I think they’d like to return Jones to a 6th-man role if possible. Beyond that, they don’t seem to be on the same page with Marcus Carr at all and combined with the self-inflicted offensive woes they’re throwing darts at names on a lineup. Askew is a decent facilitator and willing defender, but damn near refuses to look at the basket. Carr has a high passing level and can get hot shooting but seems tentative/confused about what he’s supposed to be doing in a given possession. Jase Febres is passing up open looks(!!) but is an opportunistic off-ball defender. Jones is having his usual ball-handling issues and passes up more looks than he should. The backcourt situation - which should have been a strength of this team - looks like somebody left a toddler alone with ten pounds of play-doh and three kilos of cocaine. I don’t know what the right answer is, exactly, but I might try something other than whatever the fuck they’ve been doing to Carr in practice because him being the decisive, high-motor offensive player he was in Minnesota makes a lot of these other pieces fall into a more natural place. If Askew is the starting point guard for most of the Big 12 slate, Texas is probably in serious trouble.

I know my view of the Beard hire was in the minority and that Texas fans on the whole were much more excited about him coming to town, and I know that I only see a slice of what Texas fans are saying online so I could be in a bubble of my own creation when I broach this topic…but are Texas fans already grumbling about this program? The attendance is back down to normal December Texas basketball levels, the numbers on podcasts & articles are back to normal (or less) for myself and some other sites; hell I’ve heard some whispers of people on pay sites who are normally supremely pro-Beard starting to get down on this team. The Beard Bump appears to be over, at least for now. Please feel free to comment below if you’re seeing the same thing - or if you’re having a different experience - I’m interested if what I’m seeing is actually reflective of things at large or an issue of self-selection. If Beard is already starting to lose the enthusiasm of the fans, that would be a notable change from where this thing was just two months ago and not a great sign of how things will look if Texas starts racking up losses in conference play.

Tuesday, December 28th: vs Incarnate Word 7:30 PM CT (LHN)

Saturday, January 1st: vs West Virginia 11:00 AM CT (ESPNU)

Please remember to check out Pretend We’re Football and/or our Twitter account. My next recap will come out after West Virginia, though that’s New Years Day & the game is before noon and my brain might still be mush for a bit so, uhh, probably watching that on tape delay. I have a Patreon if you want to tip me; my father became a patron, so I only have 4 other family members to guilt into subsidizing this disaster of a hobby before I move onto more distant relatives.

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