For any of you who have considered blowing out one of your tires while parking at an airport terminal for your flight, take it from me: it is absolutely as fun as you think. There are few ways to ramp up the stress of flying like doing the math on the fly of if you have enough time to change out this tire before your plane leaves, figuring out halfway through trying to get this stupid hubcap off - Kia recommends you use a Flathead screwdriver and supplies you with a Philips head because this is sublime comedy to somebody in Korea - that you do not in fact have time to change the tire, and running to the gate knowing you have that stupid flat tire waiting for you when you get back. I cannot recommend this experience highly enough, five stars.

That pavement-colored chunk of concrete in the photo is what I hit while changing lanes because I was busy reading the 48 signs they have for terminal parking directions at DFW Airport. Yes, I did go find it on the road; both to keep others from hitting it, and so I can throw it in the nearby lake at a time of my choosing. Fuck you, concrete; you’re going to spend the rest of your life being shit on by catfish and drunk boaters. I hope in a century they find you while draining the lake, pick you up, and throw you in another lake so you can drown forever, burdened with the knowledge that you absolutely earned this eternal damnation for making me stressed out for like, two hours. This may or may not be a metaphor for my relationship with Texas basketball, art is open to interpretation.

Armstrong has rightfully been getting a lot of attention for his assists, which is in part due to the system he is in and in part because he sees openings that aren’t there better than most players three years older than him. He has an assist rate of 50.4 which is tops in D-I; if you take three shots of Malort and squint at the 6-8” freshman you can see outlines of another foreign-born player whose Mavericks game Armstrong is trying to emulate; that said, the difference between Luka and Armstrong is that even at 18 Luka still would have gotten his against a team like the Longhorns where Armstrong was stymied throughout. This is who the Longhorns are, and why games against these sorts of low-level opponents don’t tell us much. Texas can take away your one great player if you don’t have any others around him, which is not nothing but also not all that much when your stated intention is to compete for banners.

This game was over by halftime, let’s move on.

The students and…uhh, much much older looking “students” who crept into the game seemed to have a blast, and it appeared by the early turnovers that both Texas and SHSU had to adjust to such a raucous atmosphere. Externally this looked like a success, and with some minor tweaks they could really make something out of this going forward. A hat tip to everyone involved for making it happen, the reviews seem to be pretty uniformly positive. That said…

Christ, what an abomination:

I get that this endeavor was a logistically complex undertaking and that Texas is juggling both doing this one-off and keeping things ready for a top-ranked volleyball squad getting set to start their postseason run, I do. The equipment people had to bring over all sorts of stuff from the Drum to make it happen, and they busted their ass, so I don’t want to diminish the effort on their part; this critique is more pointed at the schedule planners who decided to shoehorn this game into a spot where the logistics became this difficult. I think they were hoping Texas volleyball would have a longer break between the end of the regular season the start of the NCAA Tournament so maybe they could do more, but pinning your hopes on that seems..sketchy. I feel compelled to point out that the volleyball team didn’t have a home match between November 19th & December 2nd, so Texas could have, say made the Abe Lemons farce two games instead of three, pushed this game up a couple of days to a Friday evening, done all the student stuff, and brought in their Drum court to the Greg so it looked like Texas wasn’t playing on eight courts at once. If they do this again next year - and they absolutely should - then finding a way to do it so the logistics crew can setup and tear down the court would make this look way better.

Texas was leading 38-28 at half, though it wasn’t a particularly comforting 10-point lead considering SHSU had one high-major player in Savion Flagg and he was putting in work to keep things close. The Bearcats started the second half doing this interesting rub play with a big and a guard near the low post that was basically designed to separate the guard from his defender and/or generate enough confusion to open up a post entry feed, and it worked several times. SHSU got it to 38-35 and there were some nerves starting to manifest in the crowd. Fortunately, Texas settled down - going 6/9 from three has a way of doing that - and they were able to separate from the 210th-ranked team in KenPom down the stretch, but this was the first time a Beard-led Longhorns team had a brush with the kind of upset that helped doom the previous staff. If Demarkus Lampley got going with 13 minutes left in the second half instead of three minutes left, this game might have gotten dicey.

This game was 46-41 at halftime and UT-RGV was feeling itself, so much that one of the UT-RGV players felt comfortable voicing his displeasure over some of the calls to the refs in the tunnel at halftime, which earned him a technical foul and Texas two free throws to start the second half. I do not know what was said in the tunnel so I’m not taking sides, suffice it to say I hope that he got his money’s worth rather than this being a sensitive soul not liking criticism of his mistakes because it sliced the already thin chance at an upset into something even smaller (this metaphor was not my best, I shouldn’t have tried writing the entire recap in one go because now word make brain hurty). Regardless, it began a 33-5 run where Texas ran the Vaqueros the hell off the court. Unlike the SHSU game, Texas squelched any shot at an upset early in the second half and did not let up until the game was well out of reach.

I think Andrew should have been more specific before the game when he prayed he would end up on Sportscenter’s Top Ten Plays. That monkey paw curled a finger before he gave it a second thought and, well, guess who was #8 that night?

Texas went up 56-54 with 8:12 left in the game and scored their next points with 52 seconds left in the game. This team is not sound enough defensively to have 7-minute scoring gaps against the better Big 12 teams and still win; too much of the offense last night was ISO basketball, FS1 went in the huddle with Kevin Willard and he told his team something to the effect of “they’re basically just playing 1-on-1 and that’s fine”, which is true. Tre’ Mitchell was going off in the first half by getting post position and going to work on his guy, and several of the buckets in the second half were Timmy Allen doing much the same. This wasn’t a motion offense producing good looks so much as a couple of Texas players beating their man in isolation situations; Seton Hall decided that was a gamble they wanted to take, and it paid off for them because they prevented the rest of the team from generating much rhythm. I would not be surprised if other teams take a similar tact; shutting off the baseline drives, switching on the perimeter, and telling Texas they won’t win by a couple guys eating at the expense of everyone else. To be fair to Mitchell & Allen, they had to eat because they were the only people (outside of a few Ramey drives) generating their own offense. This wasn’t hero ball.

It’s a problem when I say this team has yet to really produce great offense against teams with a pulse, rather relying on individual players bailing out the system. On the other hand, Texas does have two guys (not including Ramey) who seem able to bail out the system fairly reliably, which is why you recruit them in the first place. Mitchell and Allen both put in work against Seton Hall, winning their individual matchups most of the night. If one is going to ding Chris Beard on having a substandard offense, one must also give him credit for bringing in guys who are capable of covering up the flaws of said substandard offense. Recruiting is part of being a good coach.

Texas only had to face Ike Obiagu for 5 minutes and still got waxed on the defensive glass. Seton Hall grabbed offensive rebounds off nearly 37% of their missed shots; if Texas allowed that every game they would rank in the bottom 5% of the country in defensive rebounding. This is a pattern, more on this in the macro section.

It’s almost as if - hear me out, this is something I haven’t said before and definitely won’t harp on later in this same recap - scheduling quality nonconference opponents allows the Longhorns team to have some meaningful tape against their peers. There’s only so much you can glean from Christian Bishop backing down a 6’3” religious studies major five times a game. Speaking of scheduling..

The Longhorns have one remaining opportunity to get a Q1 nonconference win against Tennessee, but right now are you confident they’ll convert it? They kinda have to, because they have zero to show the selection committee to this point. This is the life of a Beard schedule; a couple shots against quality competition surrounded by an ocean of cupcakes, and if those shots are missed then it’s all up to conference play. Texas currently has zero Q1 & Q2 wins, one Q3 win, and 5 Q4 wins; you want to know which quadrant doesn’t really matter? That’s where Texas is making its bones, and most of the rest of the nonconference schedule prior to Big 12 play is much of the same. What about Stanford, you say? Glad you asked; they’re currently #155 in NET which means beating them on a neutral court would make them a Q3 win…and about 17 spots beneath Northern Colorado currently. If Texas doesn’t beat Tennessee and goes 9-9 in conference play, they’re likely sweating come Selection Sunday. If Beard had scheduled some teams in the 51-100 range - Wichita State, Clemson, Saint Louis, & Texas State are all in that range right now, as some examples - they could at least burnish their Q2 wins (which would be Q1 if they were road games), instead he loaded up on Incarnate Word & Cal Baptist.

A basketball season is a long series of recalibrations, synthesizing new results into existing data to figure out what a given team is and could be, and with as few games as Texas has against quality competition we’re still dealing with small sample sizes. That said, I think we have enough to at least paint the outlines of the season outlook; other than a Disu-sized hole in the lineup, most of this team is becoming a known quantity, both in what they do well and what they do poorly, and we have enough data from the rest of the country & conference to get a rough sense of where in the bigger picture this team fits. I think at this point it’s pretty safe to say that Texas was overrated to start the season; the hype behind hiring Beard and his staff collecting a group of talented transfers led many people to think this was a top-five team. They are not that, and even if Dylan Disu integrates perfectly into the lineup from his first moment, they are still a talented team with a series of flaws which limits their ceiling. Unless they accomplish some or all of 1) figuring some things out as it relates to running offense against high-level defenses, 2) correcting their defensive rebounding issues, 3) getting Marcus Carr going, and/or 4) find a way to get a guard other than Courtney Ramey defending well on the perimeter, they are unlikely to battle Kansas and Baylor for the conference crown.

Are they a top-25 team? Yea, probably, and if Disu can become the best version of himself it’s possible they’re top-15; that said, a good chunk of this team is not playing as the best version of themselves, so we should probably wait to see Disu do it on the court before predicting it.

Are they good enough to make the NCAA Tournament? Absolutely.

Are they good enough to make a run in March? Uhh….maybe? The NCAA Tournament is all about matchups so I hesitate to say they’re going to definitely win X number of games, but the paper on this team is a second-weekend team. Put it another way: I don’t see this team being the type to blow a 3/14 game *dies a thousand deaths inside* but I don’t really see them being a 3 in the first place, either. I kinda feel like their range is a 4-6 seed right now, but we’re 8 games into 31+ so there is time for more recalibrations in either direction. They might figure out a couple of the aforementioned points and start to trend higher. This isn’t a bad team, just not a great one.

Here’s a Synergy chart of how the top 8 players in the rotation (in terms of shots taken) rank nationally in points per possession. See one that sticks out?

The second entry is Marcus Carr. He has had one good offensive game against SHSU and a lot of other middling performances; Texas is now roughly 20% through the regular season and Carr is still figuring out how to fit into the scoring, which is not ideal to say the least. In the idealized version of this team, Carr is a player capable of getting his own buckets at will, utilizing his speed to blow past defenders and get buckets in short-clock situations. I believe I made allusions to Isaiah Taylor in the previews in this regard; to this point, Carr has not been that guy. More to the point, against solid competition he’s been pretty inefficient as a shooter; his eFG% and true shooting percentage are both at the lowest levels of his college career. He’s still assisting other players (albeit at a lower rate than at Minnesota) which should not be diminished (I just did) but I don’t think ESPN and others were salivating over his ability to get other people buckets when they ranked him as the top transfer target in the country. It’s becoming more surprising by the week that he was ranked ahead of Remy Martin, and I’m not sure the gap between them is going to reverse itself any time soon. I hope I’m wrong, because a completely-unlocked Marcus Carr is one of the few ways Texas will reliably compete with top-10 teams.

BTW here’s the fuller picture of the same players. I cut it off at the top 8, hence the “% Time” column doesn’t quite add up to 100%:

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of Texas’ statistical numbers are being juiced by the level of competition they’re playing most nights thus far, and maybe no single factor is more responsible than turnovers forced by the Longhorns. They are currently turning teams over 27.2% of the time, which is 5th-best in D-I. However - and here lies the rub - when they played two ranked teams they forced turnovers 10.8% & 14.5% of the time, respectively. If my math is right, the 16 turnovers in 127 possessions is 12.6%, which would be 3rd-worst in D-I. It’s unfair to project out based upon two games against two very good teams, but I think it’s reasonable to say that as Texas gets into conference play their turnover numbers will decline significantly. If Texas is turning teams over every 5 possessions (20%) instead of every 4 (25%) in a given game, that’s 3-4 possessions per game (assuming they keep their current glacial tempo) where Texas has to stop a team straight up. Efficiency numbers will take a marginal hit on both ends of the floor - to name a couple of things: fewer transition opportunities for the offense, more fouls charged & shots given up for the defense - and games that would have already been close will be even closer. Games that might have been a close win could become close losses. Big 12 games are won and lost in the margins, and this area is one that bears watching if Texas ends up tracking towards a 10-8 record instead of 12-6.

There is a current rebuttal coming from Texas fans and writers, which is basically something something “wait until Dylan Disu starts playing”. I get the impulse, I’ve said it myself a couple of times earlier in the season; but I think as we get a better sense of who this team is (and isn’t) we should probably consider how much Disu changes the math. Without seeing him operate in a motion offense a lot of this is speculation, but generally Dylan Disu is a bit of an inverse Xerox copy (Zoomers, ask your grandparents) of Tre’ Mitchell, where he is better at rebounding and playing on the perimeter but worse near the basket offensively. Does that solve all of Texas’ current issues? Probably not, and as much as I like his rebounding ability him being on the perimeter limits his impact there somewhat. Putting him into the game in place of, say Mitchell or Christian Bishop might help open up the paint for some others, but that’s also dependent upon him hitting shots. If he’s shooting 28% from three, defenders can start backing off him and clogging penetration lanes again. I guess what I’m getting at here is that Disu is a very good player and will help Texas, but he isn’t Superman and won’t answer every problem Beard & Co are dealing with right now.

For example, this team is terrible at defensive rebounding; currently they are allowing their opponents to snag 31.2% of their misses, which is 258th in D-I. You know who else let opponents snag 31.2% of their misses? The 11-22 Texas squad, who relied on below-the-rim guys like Shaquille Cleare to get rebounds. A moment ago I talked about the marginal gains & losses that matter so much in Big 12 play; consider that Texas is giving up north of 30% of offensive rebounding chances when 6 of their 8 games have been against scrubs. Much like how I expect the steal percentage to drop against better competition, I expect the OR% to rise as Texas faces teams with comparable or superior size inside. Those 3-4 extra possessions rise to 4-6 extra possessions if Texas is giving up 35% on the defensive glass to their opponents, and giving a team like Baylor or Kansas more chances to score is *checks notes* not historically a successful tactic. Dylan Disu can only do so much in this regard, and I’m not sure the deficiency is personnel as much as schematic.

Here are the Big 12 teams who are currently averaging 31.2%+ on the offensive glass:

Baylor (41.2%!!)

Iowa State (35.3%)

Kansas (36.1%)

Oklahoma State (34.5%)

TCU (40.3%!)

Texas Tech (44.6%!!!)

West Virginia (34%)

That’s 70% of the conference.

Tuesday, December 14th: vs Arkansas Pine Bluff 8:00 PM CT (ESPNU)

Sunday, December 19th: vs Stanford 2:00 PM CT (ABC)

Wednesday, December 22nd: vs Rice 1:00 PM CT (LHN)

Please remember to check out Pretend We’re Football and/or our Twitter account. My next recap will come out after Rice as the games start getting back into a 2x/week cadence going forward from there. I have a Patreon if you want to tip me so I’m mildly less sassy about my schedule, or you can do like Mr. Price did and send me a very generous one-off tip which was as unexpected as it was appreciated. Thank you, sir.

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