If you notice a change in demeanor in this recap relative to the last few, congratulations; for the first week in awhile, I am whelmed. I mean, I’m still going to complain about some things because sarcasm and negativity are my love languages, but they’re couched with a caveat that overall this was a good week for Texas basketball games. Texas took care of business, showed some signs of offensive improvement, and had an offensive coherence that has been lacking in a lot of their previous games. Clearly it was Jaylon Tyson ruining this team.

This is the first time all year where Texas looked like it was a top-15 team really running a bad team out of the gym rather than their more regular appearance as a stout defensive team winning rock fights. Texas has won other games by large margins, but it rarely looked this dominant; it is unfortunately the last game of the year where Texas gets to whip up on a terrible opponent, but from the opening tip Texas played the role of dominator - spell-check wants to change that to dominatrix, and I’m considering it - and they didn’t let up even a little bit until the scrubs came in late. In a season mostly starved of interesting basketball, watching Texas punk a bad team like that was nice to see.

There is no universe where Chris Beard imitates the teams he saw under Tom Penders, and anyone who listens to Beard say they want to get out and run and believes him needs to stay away from Vegas like their life depends on it. Having said that, I saw more attempts to push the ball up the court before the defense was set in this game than in the four games before it. It didn’t result in an increase in overall possessions, but it still made a bad team work harder and those are the sorts of things a significantly better team should do in these games. Each time Courtney Ramey fires a pass halfway up the court to a sprinting Andrew Jones, my grinch heart grows a size.

I know he’s not going to keep swatting shots at the 17.5 percentage rate he has to date - consider his previous season average was 4.4 percent and his average against the two good opponents is 4.5 - and I know he’s doing it mostly against the Sisters of the Poor (Corpus Christi Campus), but it’s nice to see somebody on this team swat some shots. He’s not an elite rim protector and a significant chunk of his blocks have come outside the paint - which isn’t a bad thing! - so it’s not like I think Texas is suddenly putting up a wall at the restricted arc, I just..man, I just wanted to see a dude reject some shots on this team. Disu is already second on the team with 10 blocks, one behind Tre’ Mitchell who has played in 2.5x as many games.

It’s definitely fair to point out that West Virginia was without its leading scorer/primary offensive initiator in Taz Sherman, as well as one of its best defenders in Gabe Osabuohien; having said that, I’m not sure it would have changed the outcome. Texas was locked in defensively and as well as Sherman is playing, he’s not Superman. It’s hard to beat Texas when their defensive rotations are that tight and you’re getting that kind of production from both Ramey and Carr.

On the other end of the floor, Texas regularly took advantage of West Virginia’s sloppy off-ball defense. The Mountaineers tried to be very aggressive on the ball (up to and including several trapping attempts) but they were regularly done in by the defenders who were one pass away not adequately keeping track of Texas players. Credit to the Longhorns for not only getting open but spotting the open man and getting him the ball. Texas turned the ball over on just under 18% of their possessions which is only a bit over their season average, while WVU turned the ball over nearly 30% of the time which is nearly double their average. Some of that is due to Sherman being out, but it’s one data point that points to Texas perhaps being both as good at taking care of the ball as they’ve shown to date and can still generate turnovers against good competition. Texas being an upper-tier Big 12 team is at least partially dependent upon them winning the turnover wars, so this is a good step.

Texas shot 15-16 from the line in this game; the Longhorns are a good free throw shooting team and there isn’t an obvious weak link for an opponent to exploit in late-game situations. Timmy Allen might be the worst of the likely free throw shooters at 72%, which is still respectable. I’ve written about the downside of not having raw hyper-athletes on the team, but one of the upsides of having a team full of already-developed upperclassmen is that they tend to hit their free throws. There is no Tristan Thompson in the lineup to sink the overall team average.

Against WVU, Texas had 68 possessions; if they did that every game their tempo would be ~150 spots higher on KenPom, or just a shade below the D-I average of 68.6 possessions per game. I think just about everyone involved in watching the game enjoyed the energy and entertainment level of yesterday’s pace, especially relative to what we’ve seen to date. Here’s hoping they continue to push the tempo as the season goes on, though I feel compelled to mention it’s possible Texas was simply pushed to that tempo because the Mountaineers play at about the pace we saw yesterday. You might be concerned that Texas can get sped up by other Big 12 teams, but frankly the team looked more coherent at that pace so if Texas becomes more entertaining to watch solely because other teams are shoving them onto the dancefloor and cranking up the BPM, oh well…two birds, one stone. About half of the Big 12 plays around the 67 possession mark, so please, by all means, other teams please get Texas to run some more.

The last week has been encouraging to see, but it’s still just two games compared to the 11 before it. Texas continuously - emphasis on continuously - playing at this level brings them back into the discussion for third place in the conference. Has Texas turned a corner offensively, or is this an aberration? We will find out eventually, small sample sizes are a bitch though.

Parts of the internet have been bubbling that Jaylon Tyson wasn’t the only Texas player looking for a way out, thus far it’s all been third-hand gossip rather than anything solid. It appears that at least some portion of this was stirred up by Tech fan Twitter accounts. One went so far to make a terrible Photoshop in a (since deleted) tweet:

That’s a lot of effort to spend on tweeting out some shit that doesn’t even make sense; Carr is a senior who has already used up his one-time free transfer, in this Red Raider fever dream where exactly is he going to go? Christian Bishop is in the same situation, it’s like people don’t even think before they blast this stuff out. There may be another transfer along the way - I haven’t heard anything specific, just speaking hypothetically here - but it has to come from someone who has a redshirt or eligibility to burn; Carr and Bishop would just be ending their college careers early. If somebody said, for example Devin Askew was looking around, that would at least make some logistical sense.

While you were reading this recap, AJ1 had two more transition layups swatted into low-earth orbit. I don’t know if I’ve ever said this about a Texas guard before, but maybe you should pull up for the floater instead of getting to the rim? Either that or learn what Baylor calls ‘level one’ shots where the ball’s trajectory hits the backboard above the square, because the current geometry of Jones’ layup attempts results in it being intercepted by an opponent’s palm more often than a Kate McKinnon Verizon commercial airing during NFL games. He’s not getting into the chest of the defenders when he goes up so their size isn’t negated, and even when he does there’s a trailing defender coming in to swat the shot. It’s sort of amazing how reliably this is happening now.

Rowan Brumbaugh - whose name sounds like he’s a minor character in A Christmas Carol - committed to Texas this week. He’s a 4-star point guard who once was committed to Northwestern, but decommitted and chose Texas despite never visiting campus. This one appears to have come out of nowhere and the circumstances around it are a bit odd, but as I mentioned in the previous post Beard needs bodies if he’s going to avoid another year of overwhelming transfer numbers. Perhaps he’s decided 6 transfers is 1-2 too many in a given season, or perhaps he just really likes this young man’s game. I’ll defer to recruiting experts who know better than me.

As the season has worn on, Allen’s offensive load has continued to drop. Some of this is Disu getting minutes, but even when Allen is on the floor he’s taking fewer shots. In the 5 games Disu has played, Allen has averaged 27.8 minutes and his possession percentage (basically how often a possession ends with him making a shot, missing a shot, or turning the ball over) is 21.2; in the 8 games prior, Allen averaged 26.8 minutes and his possession percentage is 28.4. I’m not sure how much of that is due to Disu because Allen and Bishop are paired together a lot more often than Allen & Disu, so something else is going on. When I have more time I’ll try to figure out if it’s a matter of defenses playing him differently - I know some have started sending doubles his way, but it’s not all the time - or if he’s ceding shots to teammates, but he’s gone from being a primary option to kinda being Just A Guy. He also gets pinned under the basket a lot for someone of his size; I’m not sure if it’s more a matter of teammates getting him the ball in a bad spot, him grabbing rebounds then being surrounded by trees, or him not stopping his drives at the right place, but it’s some combination of all three and he’s largely quit trying to get the shot up when he’s down there and that’s not a great place to be trying to pass out of. It’s a minor thing, but I keep noticing it.

West Virginia wasn’t the only Big 12 team dealing with COVID issues; Oklahoma had three guys out in their game against Kansas State, TCU had to postpone their conference opener against Kansas, and Oklahoma State hasn’t played a game since December 18th. Until this wave subsides, the scheduling is going to be in flux for a number of teams, and it’s probably safe to say that at some point Texas will have to deal with it in the team as well. This season may end up being like last season with games shifting around a lot, and the NCAA says they’re still planning on doing a ‘normal’ tournament hosting site format but we’ll see how it ends up.

Tuesday, January 4th: at Kansas State 7:00 PM CT (ESPN+)

Saturday, January 8th: at Oklahoma State 1:00 PM CT (CBS)

Please remember to check out Pretend We’re Football and/or our Twitter account. My next recap will come out after Oklahoma State. I have a Patreon if you want to tip me for complaining about yet another undefeated week.

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