It’s 70 degrees in DFW as I type this recap, which is decidedly not “Christmas” weather but I got to drive with the windows down on my way to pick up al pastor tacos from a Mexican meat market, so all-in-all I’d call it an unexpected bonus in the waning days of a hellscape year. Much in the same vein, Texas basketball being ranked in the top 10 while Longhorns football fans are mired in their own form of unending purgatory is its own unexpected bonus. Would I have expected Texas to be in the top 10 right now prior to the Baylor postponement? Nah, probably not. I’m not giving the ranking to Rutgers just because this fell into my lap, they can pry it from my grease-stained, cilantro-infused fingers.

Yea, I know, everybody’s talking about the other guy, and I’ll get to him; but as big a potential development as #HedgehogFam could be for this team, AJ1 finding his stroke against a solid defense is bigger in my eyes. Jones is getting right offensively, and if he can continue to provide quality shots both inside and outside the arc he’s going to fix a lot of the potential stagnation that awaits against the best defensive teams. 3-6 from three was nice, but the 5-11 from two was even better; it’s one thing if Jones is firing from deep, if he adds a reliable ability to get to the paint and hit near the basket then he becomes nigh-impossible to defend. He didn’t do well against a press which isn’t very surprising to anyone who has watched him over the years, but it’s a secondary complaint for a guy who was very nearly the player of the game. Speaking of…

Who did you think I was going to mention?

Ramey put up a bagel on the scoreboard but showed far better on the defensive end where his task was to slow down Cade Cunningham. He did a great job for most of the game, he spent the better part of 30 minutes inside Cunningham’s jersey. It wasn’t until the last 8 minutes or so that Ramey started to deal with foul trouble that he had to back off Cunningham a bit and Cade started to get going. While it would have been nice to see Ramey put a few points on the board, it appeared to me like Texas was consciously limiting his work on the offensive end to let him focus on defense. For the most part, it worked well; Cunningham handed out 6 turnovers and went 1-6 from three, a lot of that stems from Ramey’s work. Speaking of a lot of hard work…

What?

Sims didn’t put in a lot of work in this game, playing 17 minutes and only 4 of those came in the second half. I’d like to see him play more in the second half, primarily because it means he’s been productive enough to merit it. Speaking of things I like seeing more of…

OK, fine, let’s talk about him.

Just kidding.

Welcome to the show, Mr. Brown. In what you could see in fits & starts throughout the first handful of games, Brown provided in bulk in this game. His 24/14 was a LOUD 24/14, and it showcased the ways in which a player of his ilk can contribute mightily to a win. His threes were more the types of threes Brown needs, there were fewer threes off the dribble and more of the catch & shoot variety. He grabbed boards against an OSU team that wasn’t getting much from the Boone brothers and had to go smaller, he dunked over Cunningham, and he played mostly decent defense. He still got caught on an unnecessary charge - this is the one issue that is relatively easy to fix and could significantly improve his efficiency - which drives me a little crazy every time it happens, but it happening once instead of three times is an improvement unto itself.

No but seriously though, if you want to know why he’s so highly ranked: from the 10:49 mark in the second half when Texas went up 55-42, Cade Cunningham subbed in and took over for his team. He scored 15 points, dished two assists, and was the primary reason this game was in doubt at the end. His technical foul was bullshit; he got hacked on a layup by two different Texas defenders, and when he (loudly) complained the refs teed him up for having the temerity to point out they fucked up. I’m not at all surprised they did that, refs rarely react well to owning their mistakes in the moment. Cunningham is the real deal, if he was on a better team he’d probably average 22/7/5.

One of the things Tim Preston has repeatedly mentioned on Pretend We’re Football this season is that Texas needs to figure out who its third guy is behind Matt Coleman and Courtney Ramey, and he’s absolutely correct. I think both Tim and I were hoping Andrew Jones would be that guy and early returns weren’t very encouraging on that front, however his last couple of games have been much better and he’s showing a diversity of scoring which makes him more valuable than, say last year’s Jase Febres. He’s not the only potential third guy, either; Greg Brown’s form the last couple of games has shown he could potentially be that third guy as well. Texas now has a couple of people who could be ‘the third guy’ in a given game, which at the very least gives Shaka Smart & Co some options in how they want to attack. It also helps because it means that they might even have ‘the fourth guy’ in some games if both of those guys are producing reliably good scoring efforts, and it allows guys like Kai Jones, Jericho Sims, and Brock Cunningham to be role players rather than shoehorning them into a ‘creator’ role which they are not capable of being at this point. If Texas is to contend with the upper half of the Big 12, these questions turning into answers are big.

I’ve had a number of people ask me some form of “why isn’t Player X starting over Jericho Sims” in the last couple of weeks, in part because some bench guys are performing well and in part because Sims is struggling this season. It’s a fair question; as mentioned on the podcast I’ve made allusions to thinking that Sims may not react well to being benched, and that there’s a chance benching him means he starts to perform even worse when he’s on the floor. Rather than take that chance, I wonder if the coaching staff has worked up an alternative system where Sims plays the minutes of a bench player but starts both halves. The pros: Sims stays locked in, they get a good idea of what he’s going to give them the first 4 minutes of each half, and they can distribute the other minutes more equitably. It’s benching a guy without actually benching him, it’s a secret bench. It’s basically the opposite of what happened with Myles Turner, where Rick Barnes had all of one way to punish a one & done for not playing within the system.

Consider the following minutes distribution this year from games rated either Tier A or Tier B by KenPom:

Player A: 18, 13, 26, 20, 24

Player B: 20, 30, 21, 24, 4

Player C: 34, 14, 13, 23, 17

Without looking it up, can you tell which one started these 5 games? I’ll post the answers at the bottom, but I don’t think I’d have better than a 50/50 guess if I hadn’t looked it up. I could see a coaching staff go to the other two players and basically say “don’t worry, you’ll get your minutes, but we need the other guy to start” and they’d be fine with it. I don’t personally care who starts if the minutes are getting handed out like this, it’s not like somebody is wasting away on the bench. Well, other than our sweet prince, the Rudy of Texas if Rudy were actually cool and not a Disney-fied fraud, Drayton Whiteside.

I was asked by someone how to be a basketball school fan, in light of Texas being a clear basketball-first school now. This is a duty I do not take lightly, except when I say the word ‘duty’ because it reminds me of Seth Davis trying out the word ‘dudiest’ on live TV

Without further ado, here are the core tenets to being a fan at a basketball school:

Unless you’re 1976 Indiana or 2020 Gonzaga, you’re going to drop some games along the way. Sometimes they’re even to bad teams! Last year Kentucky dropped a game to 294th-ranked Evansville at home and was still on track for a 4-seed, Duke lost at home to 100th-ranked SFA and were likely to be a 3-seed. Losses happen and collect enough of them then things are worrying, but only the last one of the season is the truly unbearable one.

Unless it’s Radford.

Or Chaminade.

You are going to see refs fall for a guy sliding under an offensive player several times this season (and that’s just the Texas Tech games, HEY-OOO!) and every single time it will make you angry. It’s okay to be angry about this because it’s bullshit, and yet you have to understand you’re basically fighting the ocean.

I once happened to be in the same Austin hotel as TV Teddy; I don’t know why he was in town or what he was talking about when I saw him drinking his morning coffee, but the fact that I not only recognized him but wanted to throw Springfield Suites breakfast buffet bacon at his face says a lot about the problem. I shouldn’t know the names of referees, they shouldn’t be the showcase, but TV Teddy and Hollywood Higgins earned their nicknames for the zeal with which they enjoy turning games on their heads. Both of them should be forced to ref pre-K games with 6-foot hoops for the rest of their lives, instead they’re going to give a freshman on your team a technical for hanging on the rim .00005 seconds longer than they deem appropriate.

College refs don’t work for a conference, really; they’re independent contractors who get paid by the game and with no real limits on how many games they’re allowed to work other than the literal amount of time it takes them to travel to the arena. Keith Kimble worked 106 games last season, 107 the season before that, 99 the season before that. He worked every single day from February 17th to February 27th, here’s the list of games he refereed along with their locations:

He took one day off then worked from February 29th to March 8th with zero days off:

While Keith Kimble is the most prolific, he’s not an anomaly. Ken Pomeroy loves following the travels of Roger Ayers because the guy is always working:

You cannot tell me that many days working in a row doesn’t impact the quality of their work at least a little.

The thing about college basketball that keeps it from commoditizing (I think that’s a word, albeit probably only in sales) into a NBA clone is the sheer number of teams who need players and the relative dearth of players who can do an approximation of what NBA players can do. I’m sure Chicago State would love to have a Kristaps Porzingis as its big, but they’re unlikely to find one who hasn’t already been snapped up by a bigger fish. So teams all over the spectrum find their own way of playing, which means there’s a ton of different styles on display. Whether it’s The Citadel’s desire to run and gun, or Virginia’s desire to snuff out anything faster than a brisk walk, or FGCU’s Dunk City, you can see all sorts of offensive and defensive ideas (and the pros & cons therein) on display from night to night. Your coach’s style is obviously the correct one though, everybody else has it wrong.

College basketball has a large enough sample size that the data starts to get really interesting and informative compared to football, and the college game’s embrace of it is one of the better developments of the past 15 years. There are a ton of great sites you can bookmark, most of which are free or have a pretty reasonable subscription price. Ken Pomeroy, Bart Torvik, Jordan Sperber, Halfcourt Hoops, Synergy, Hoop Math, and Bracket Matrix will give you more data and analysis than you can shake a stick at. I don’t know why you would want to shake a stick at your laptop, but even if you did there would be more data left unshook.

I cannot stress this enough: your program is the clean one. It doesn’t matter if you’re Coppin State or Kentucky, the reason you missed out on a player is because somebody else paid him off. You would’ve snagged him on a level playing field, that’s for sure. Nobody recruits like your guy.

Unless your coach is Rick Stansbury, then you know what you signed up for.

Actually I’m pretty sure other sports think this too; how else could a sport that’s a niche sport for 90% of its season become the biggest show on Earth for ~8 days in spring? So congratulations, you’re already on your way to being a basketball school fan!

There are a handful of other plausible answers for the color gig - Jay Bilas, Fran Fraschilla, Dan Dakich when he’s not settling Twitter grievances on air - but nobody in the college game does PxP like Shulman. Jon Sciambi’s probably the closest, but when Shulman is on your call it’s probably a big game.

(The answer from earlier: A is Kai Jones, B is Brock Cunningham, and C is Jericho Sims.)

Tuesday, Dec 29: Texas A&M-Corpus Christi 11AM CT (LHN)

Please remember to check out Pretend We’re Football, the next episode will probably be online prior to the Texas A&M-CC game. My next recap will come out after the next game, probably the next day. Also, I have a Patreon if you want to tip me for making fun of referees. Happy holidays, everyone.

Writing tunes provided by Yeadon.