I am a combination of tired and hungover I cannot adequately describe so let’s get to it.

This is fun, Texas should do it more often.

I watched the end of the game late due to work, and based upon the length of the DVR recording I suspected the game was heading to OT as I told my fiancee good night and went back to the TV. She was sound asleep as the last couple minutes of OT played and as such, I let out the world’s loudest completely silent scream of catharsis when the clock hit 0:00 in OT. Texas has not swept Kansas since at least 2004, and that ‘sweep’ was one game in the regular season and one in the conference tournament. This is a rare event, and should be appreciated as such; even with Kansas being ‘down’ - they’re still probably going to be a 4 or 5 seed - Texas fans should celebrate this win like Ewoks on Endor, drunk off whatever berry wine they drink there. Maybe lick a toad or huff Chewbacca’s butt musk, really go to town. You’ll pay for it the next morning, but you probably have a decade to recover before it happens again.

Any discussion of Texas imploding or dealing with internal strife should probably be shelved on the Lazy Armchair Analysis bookshelf going forward, because if that was true this team would have folded in the first half. Instead, they fought back, took out a resurgent Kansas squad, and locked up their spot in the postseason. Get your toads out!

Opponents have figured out how to attack Greg Brown because his weakside defense is pretty bad. He doesn’t communicate well enough, he closes out late, he doesn’t tag the roller consistently, he’s a sieve in anything other than on-ball defense. There’s a reason he didn’t play much in the second half and a reason why Texas synced up defensively in the second half; the coaching staff looks like they’re going to roll with him in the starting lineup each game to see what they’re getting from him, but I would expect opponents to target him like this the rest of the season. His rebounding only helps so much if he’s giving up buckets at a high rate, and if he’s not grabbing rebounds then he’s making the team worse. The defensive issues aren’t all on him, but he’s the primary weakness in my eyes.

If Cunningham developed an offensive identity, he would be impossible to keep out of the starting lineup. He does so many good things defensively and on the glass that he’s invaluable to the team, and if he could do something as simple as finish consistently at the rim on cuts he would probably add 4-5 points/game to Texas’ total. He’s a perfect 7th/8th man as it stands, and could be more next season.

Texas his nearly 78% of their free throws, including a perfect 14/14 from Courtney Ramey and Andrew Jones.

..is maybe the best big in the Big 12? Derek Culver probably would have a word in this discussion, but is there another big who has shown his combination of defensive soundness - David McCormack had been on a tear coming into this game and Sims defended him as well as anybody in the last month - and surprising handles this season? There is nobody in the Big 12 converting twos at a higher percentage (73.4%) than him, he’s fourth in the conference in DR% and 13th in OR%, and he’s 12th in block percentage, plus teams were trying to switch him onto guards and he’s holding his own against them all to the point they’re not actively doing it any more. He’s playing so well that Texas is now literally just throwing the ball in the air near him because he’ll out-jump whoever he’s around to snag it and then put 1-2 moves on his defender before scoring. There are very few bigs like him in the country, and he’s putting on a show.

Texas didn’t hit a field goal until 9 minutes into the second half, which the announcing crew rightfully talked about a lot. The color commentator Dollar Store Joe Pesci kept talking about Texas needing to get into the paint and/or feed the bigs, so I went back and watched the first ~20 possessions of the second half to get a better idea of if Texas was really settling. I did the first 12 minutes of the half, ending on the Greg Brown layup at 8:14 when the score was 54-44. It was only the second made field goal of the half for Texas, which sounds bad (because it is) but deserves some context. There were 21 possessions that ended in either a shot attempt, turnover, or free throws, of those 14 touched the paint at least once (several touched twice) and there were four missed threes I classified as open (one more was lightly contested). I color-coded 13 of the 21 as green, meaning I think they were doing what their offense was designed to do and getting shot attempts they wanted to get. They just didn’t convert most of those attempts, it happens. Some of it was Tech making adjustments, like the aggressive help on Sims (more on that below) or them doing a better job cutting off the baseline and they deserve a tip of the hat for how hard they defended, but Texas had their open looks.

Texas played Tech to a draw in the last 10 minutes, which includes the free throws Tech hit at the end to seal the game. Texas didn’t hit their open shots early in the half and it cost them, but it wasn’t a wild lack of execution that led to the loss. Sure, there were things they could have cleaned up - they missed two layups in transition that could have been and-1 situations instead of two free throws and Ramey could have finished at the rim more consistently, as two examples - but this wasn’t a Texas offense that went brain-dead.

The atrocious Mac McClung three-point foul call aside - McClung threw himself against a set Kai Jones like he was a monster climbing a building in the next Rampage movie - the refs were pretty solid today. They were pretty consistent in what they called and didn’t call; I figure I’ve complained enough about them in previous columns that I should give them their due when they do alright.

You know what I said in the Kansas section? Same thing.

It’s such a weirdly flat shot, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another one like it. He looks like he watched somebody play Double Dribble on the NES for form tips without noticing those threes had arc on them.

The only way Tech slowed him down and kept Texas from running their “just throw it near Jericho” play was by collapsing half the team on him. In the second half, nearly every time he established post position, Tech tagged him with at least two people. One of his turnovers was because there were four Tech defenders going after him. If he can consistently see that collapsing defense and kick it out, Texas will make somebody pay for this plan.

Losses suck, but they suck a bit less after you’ve swept Kansas and locked up a NCAA Tourney bid. Texas has sealed their spot in March Madness before the month of March began, which is something that hasn’t been said in what, 5 years and maybe twice in the last decade? I’m going off memory here, but the only Texas teams since 2011 that likely reached ‘lock’ status with 4 games left in the season are probably the ‘14 & ‘16 squads. So while I would have liked to win the Tech game, it’s not a season-altering loss. The bigger prize is in March and Texas has punched its ticket with time to spare, things are still largely on track unless you expected the Longhorns to go undefeated in conference play.

While I appreciate AJ1’s renewed dedication to rebounds, he’s 3-23 from three in the last 4 games and that is not going to cut it. He’s now a shade under 30% from three on the year, and given he’s by far the most prodigious shooter and averaging a bit over 6 attempted threes a game that’s not exactly helping the team’s efficiency metrics. He needs to take fewer contested threes and get his feet under him in catch & shoot situations.

Texas and Oklahoma lost while West Virginia won, though WVU was expected to win their game against KSU more than Texas or OU were expected to win theirs so it’s not really that big a divergence of possibilities. Texas still has an outside shot at 2nd, but only if they beat Oklahoma. A win over either Iowa State or TCU coupled with a couple of Tech losses removes 7th from the list of possibilities, as does a win over both and a single Tech loss. I suspect 3rd-5th is still the most likely outcome for Texas at this point.

EDIT: with Baylor losing to Kansas, 2nd place is officially toast.

Losing to Tech should pretty much eliminate even the smallest of windows to a 2-seed for Texas, but that was a pretty tiny chance regardless of the outcome of this game. (If Texas makes a run in the conference tourney, this might crack open again.) Texas’ most likely path still sits somewhere in the 3 or 4-seed range unless they get dropped a line for selection committee conference scheduling reasons. A loss to ISU and/or TCU would change that math as well.

Tuesday, March 2nd: at Iowa State 6 PM CT (ESPN+) - 84% KenPom win probability

Thursday, March 4th: at Oklahoma 8 PM CT (ESPN/ESPN2) - 47% KenPom win probability

Sunday, March 7th: at TCU 6 PM CT (ESPN+) - 77% KenPom win probability

Please remember to check out Pretend We’re Football and/or our Twitter account. My next recap will come out after the TCU game. Also, I have a Patreon if you want to tip me for charting futility.

Writing tunes provided by Tyler Johnston.