I am conspicuously quiet during games; some people have floated the idea of the Pretend We’re Football guys doing a Twitch livestream of a game and I usually shoot it down because I don’t think people are going to want to watch 2+ hours of me staring silently at a TV. This is also why I rarely watch games with other people over - I mean, in non-pandemic times - because I’m focusing on the game. I mention this because when Andrew Jones hit that three, I yelped so loudly it scared my girlfriend who was halfway across the house at the time. If I had cameras inside the house and could post the video, it would’ve looked like one of those pranks where a guy pretends to be a statue and screams at innocent pedestrians except instead of a statue it would have been a sculpture of a guy hiding his face like he was watching The Ring or any Adam Sandler movie made after 2005 for the first time.

Flatly put, Texas loses this game most years. I don’t know how much I would have called this a ‘trap’ game as I think Iowa State playing Baylor to a draw for 30 minutes shows they’re more than just a trap opponent, and when you’re a top-5 team 2/3 of your opponents qualify as ‘trap’ opponents. I get why people would say it and it’s not entirely without merit, I’m probably being pedantic. It’s stunning that I might split a hair, I know.

Texas wasn’t really playing well in this game; they were at best a B- on offense and the defense was running the “Cs Get Degrees” effort level, and Iowa State tried to make them pay for it. They got it down to 4 late but even at that point I still didn’t feel like they were going to upset Texas. Pomeroy’s win probability reflects as much:

In other years, this sort of effort would likely have resulted in an L, but Texas is good enough this year to avoid paying a real consequence. That doesn’t preclude them from taking a bad L down the road though.

This kinda feels anticlimactic in light of the next game’s events, but AJ1 played really well in this contest. His willingness to drive to the rim paid off a number of times, and only Greg Brown had more defensive rebounds than Jones.

Generally speaking, any offensive rating of 100 or better is a good contribution. There are caveats to this, most notably that the fewer minutes a player gets the more wildly the number can fluctuate. That said, five different Texas players were over 100 and Matt Coleman was the lowest of the group at 116.

Coleman 116

Brown 125

AJ1 126

Kai Jones 134

Sims 144

Febres was dressed out for the second straight game, and I suspect if Texas had ever built a 20-point lead they would have put him in. It’s probably a good sign of Shaka understanding his roster that he’s not going to put Febres in just to get him minutes if it’s going to screw with team execution. I don’t mean that as a knock on Febres who is very much a team guy, rather that Smart and his staff seem to show a reliable willingness to put the team ahead of a single player for the first time in…ever? It seems inevitable that Febres will reenter the rotation, I’m not entirely sure when it will happen though.

Let’s all be very clear here: Texas stole that game. West Virginia outplayed Texas for the vast majority of the game; they out-rebounded Texas, they shot better from the perimeter than Texas, and they effectively matched Texas in free throws. West Virginia doesn’t lose many games where they win both the rebounding and 3-point-shooting metrics, and they played well enough to beat about 348 D-I teams. Texas should have run straight from the arena to the plane to avoid being stopped by local cops and forced to play 5 more minutes because they would have lost. I expected Texas to win that game for exactly the last 1.8 seconds of regulation.

But I’m not handing that W over.

BTW here’s Craig Way’s call of the shot. I know Craig incites varied opinions from people regarding his pxp but for most of my life he’s understood the big moments in Longhorns sports and his emotions match the circumstances every damn time. I stan Craig Way.

There are a number of factors I could point to that “without ‘X’ Texas doesn’t win this game” but they all pale in comparison to the work Ramey did in this game. He drove the ball to the rim over and over again, and he wasn’t doing it because of any predetermination but rather because it was the right play over and over again. In addition, his added strength allowed him to finish at the rim in ways that weren’t possible two years ago. Ramey accounted for 2/3 of the teams assists and went 5-6 from the line, plus he played pretty damn good defense. Texas is going back to Austin with an L if Ramey doesn’t play this well. Look at that Jones three play again; Ramey not only ran up the floor before the Mountaineers get set but he drives to the rim effectively enough that he draws all five defenders to him allowing him to kick out to the open man. That attention was the interest earned from all the deposits he made at the rim in the previous 39 minutes, and Texas is richer for it.

There are a lot of lottery picks who would go 0-4 from three and 4-8 from the line and call the day lost, which from a business standpoint I get; you’re at this school for a few months as a necessary stop on the way to a real payday, if your eyes are on the larger prize there are business decisions to be made along the way. Brown doesn’t do that, instead of letting the point total and shooting woes bother him, he grabs 14 rebounds. FOURTEEN, 12 of them on the defensive end. That’s 12 times West Virginia doesn’t get another shot up in a two-point win. I appreciate that he’s doing things he doesn’t have to do, he has 10+ rebounds four times in 11 games.

In completely unrelated news, Myles Turner grabbed double-digit rebounds 7 times in 34 games at Texas and never snagged 12 defensive rebounds in any game despite playing more minutes per game than Greg Brown.

Okay, maybe it’s a little related.

There was a single possession where Cunningham snagged two offensive rebounds and nearly got a third before falling out of bounds. It’s entirely possible that I will run into Cunningham sometime in 2033 and I will giggle like a Zoomer spotting a K-Pop star in JFK. I make no apologies for this, I will overrate I MEAN PROPERLY RATE PERHAPS EVEN UNDERRATE Brock Cunningham for the rest of my days.

Tough day for Sims, but Derek Culver is a beast and one of the few players in the conference who can match Sims’ combination of strength & athleticism. I think Sims got a couple of rough calls, but sometimes you tip your cap to the other player. Culver would start for pretty much any team in the country right now.

Jordan Sperber - who has an excellent Substack with both free & paid versions, and both are great if you’re interested in learning about the game - talked about ghost screens in one of his most recent entries. It’s a great name for something I’ve been seeing as of late; basically whenever you see a player come up like they’re going to set a screen but they keep running past the ballhandler, that’s a ghost screen. Texas has been running a lot of these and I wasn’t sure exactly how to describe it, ghost screens is perfect.

I’m posting one of his video breakdowns below from his free Substack where you can see an example of a ghost screen, if you’re a basketball fan you really should subscribe to his stuff.

In my Big 12 preview, I talked about the stretch Texas is currently in:

They’re 2-0 so far and won one of the two most-likely losses, which means we’re now talking about a possible 6-1 run. If Texas can get past Texas Tech on Wednesday then there’s a distinct possibility the Longhorns could be 9-0 heading into a February 2nd Austin matchup against a 9-0 Baylor team. That’s several games away for both teams and I’m not counting any chickens, I just want you to understand that this is in play and that Tuesday night game will get all of college basketball’s attention. Texas has to get there first, but the next five games are the - and I use this term extremely loosely - easiest portion of Texas’ schedule. The Longhorns need to stack as many wins in this 7-game stretch that they can if they want to keep being talked about as a 1-seed.

Sims put up two stellar performances against Kansas and Iowa State, and while his performance against Culver is understandable on its own I’m still watching to see if the first two games mentioned were aberrations or the start of a breakout. Thus far we have more data for the former over the latter, but it was around this time last season where Sims started to show out and I’ve seen enough stretches where he really shined that I’m not ruling anything out just yet. Time will tell, but this team can beat anybody if Sims becomes as consistently good as Coleman and Ramey.

Matt Coleman and Courtney Ramey are both reliably good options and we’ve been talking about ‘the third guy’ on PWF for a lot of this season, well it seems pretty safe to say Andrew Jones has taken that ‘third guy’ spot for himself. Who the ‘fourth guy’ is remains to be seen, and frankly if Texas gets a consistent ‘fourth guy’ then this season could be truly special. It’s probably enough to say that Texas having three guys who are consistently ‘guys’ - I really need to come up with a better term for this, if you include my username I’ve already said ‘guy’ 14 times in this recap and I guess now it’s 15 oh god I’m stuck in a loop guy 16 please somebody help me - then it allows any of the other players to rotate in as the fourth guy (17!) in a given night.

It was 3 years ago today that Shaka Smart had to tell the team that Andrew Jones had leukemia, and it was 3 years ago tomorrow that the TCU game happened. Texas gutted out a double-overtime win against TCU, and you could see how much it meant not just to the players but also the coaching staff. Along with half the team, Shaka Smart fought back tears during The Eyes, and I was right there with them. Watching a young man who is at the apex of his athletic ability get dragged down into nearly nothing over a disease was heartbreaking, and watching a team rally around him in absentia was incredible to see. That team lurched back and forth as they dealt with myriad issues both physical & mental, and by the time they lost to Nevada they looked exhausted.

All the while, Andrew Jones was shedding weight fighting the disease; Texas fans came together to help pay for an enormously expensive treatment, allowing a young man whose family might not have been able to pay for it all to make a full recovery. We watched him dribble in the hospital, we watched him shoot in practuce, and slowly the arc of his life bend towards a return to the court where he desperately wanted to be. 36 months to the day after his diagnosis, he hit a game-winning shot for the same program. Basketball is a game, and life means so much more than a sport, but at the same time this exact moment was the goal he worked towards for years and years. To see him celebrate on the court, to see his team celebrate around him, to know his family was screaming as loudly at home as he was on the court…sometimes this dumb sport is divine. In a year where we all could use some joy as a distraction from the outside world Andrew Jones is a constant source of happiness. Whether he hits a game-winner or not, his resurgence from the depths of disease is an emotional wellspring we’re all lucky enough to have and one which he gives willingly. He has agency in all of this and he makes a choice to let us in, and we should be thankful for his maturity and willingness to share this journey. #AJ1 forever

Wednesday, Jan 13: vs Texas Tech 8 PM CT (ESPN2) - 68% KenPom win probability

Saturday, Jan 16: vs Kansas State 7 PM CT (LHN) - 95% KenPom win probability

Please remember to check out Pretend We’re Football; this was the Kansas reaction show, our next show will come out by…Tuesday? My next recap will come out after the KSU game. Also, I have a Patreon if you want to tip me for splitting hairs again.

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