Texas came out of the week with an expected loss and an expected win which is a decent enough result, all things considered. Winning in Lubbock would have been difficult even without all the *waves at everything* surrounding it, but was a nearly impossible task when you factor everything in. Beating Iowa State is as much about not letting somebody other than Brockington get hot as anything, which Texas accomplished and then some. Call it a par week, I guess.

One of the casualties of realignment is long-standing blood feuds being broken up by conference moves. There are fewer rivalries where the teams have played 100+ times and legitimately dislike each other. The conference opponents have less built-up animosity on average, so when you see a new Hatfield/McCoy hatred being born in real-time you have to appreciate it while it exists, especially since this one is about to be broken up by yet another conference move. Texas Tech knows it only has a few chances left to really let Chris Beard and Texas know what they think of last April’s shenanigans and they are making the most of every opportunity. I respect the hell out of it, and the spectacle both before and during the game is the closest I’ve felt to an old-school SWC “Texas goes to Fayetteville” vibe in years. They were out for blood and they got it, there were at least four moments that bordered on collective orgasm and I’m pretty sure in 9 months there’s going to be an explosion of Lubbock babies named Mark, Bryson, and Kevin. Unfortunately for them, they’ll still be growing up in Lubbock.

Tech is not the first team this season to double Texas bigs in the low post, but they added a wrinkle that I haven’t seen much of from anybody else. They would send a second baseline player into the paint but not fully commit and they’re almost hiding behind their own man to keep the Texas big from recognizing the incoming double. Once the big started dribbling then the full commit would come, but only from the big’s blindside which helps delay the trap recognition and makes picking his pocket a bit easier. This is a fascinating wrinkle, it effectively hedges between the aggressive help the no-middle defense is known for and makes it harder for teams to punish the defense for over-helping.

To wit:

This defensive wrinkle works especially well against players who are more focused on the rim than the defense and I would bet teams like Baylor & Kansas pick up on this tactic when they load up Synergy this week. Texas is going to have to either A: teach their bigs to keep an eye out for their blindside (I swear that’s possible) or B: recognize the double and pass out of it early enough that second defender can’t recover. I don’t know if they’re going to be able to do it in time, the post moves this defense is exploiting are ones that these guys have drilled into their brain over years and it may just be an ongoing problem. Still, this is one of those little tweaks that has earned Mark Adams the defensive reputation he owns across basketball.

I shudder to think what this game score is without him.

I don’t know why Adams waited until 6 minutes left in the contest to bring Shannon into the game but I started cackling, it’s like that episode of ‘Coach’ where he faked his star QB being in a wheelchair on the sidelines until the last series and sent him in to win the game, which is a reference that dates me way more than I care to admit. That’s how out of hand the game felt, Mark Adams was like “hey Terrence, you wanna get some work in” with 6 minutes left in the contest.

Texas hit 6 field goals in the final 17 minutes of the first half which sounds terrible but also not exactly unique this season. In the second half, Beard went away from his larger lineups and lo & behold the offensive spacing improved. It’s almost as if this team is better offensively when they’re playing 4-out basketball instead of running 2-3 bigs in the paint at any given time. Texas got open looks from the perimeter and hit enough of them that - when combined with mostly tight defense against a team with limited offensive options - Texas turned a close battle into a rout. This game was over well before the clock expired.

It’s amazing how a fairly simple zone tends to flummox Texas. A significant chunk of the Texas offensive woes in the first half were them brain-locking against the 1-3-1; the Texas motion offense is currently designed to get low-post touches and the 1-3-1 does a good job of limiting those, which is a problem unless you can adjust and get the ball in the dead zones around the perimeter for a hot shooter to exploit. Speaking of..

AJ1 had a “get right” game, taking confident shots and hitting them. It was good to see, hopefully he has a few more of those games in him down the stretch, Texas will need them.

Some people have said Texas needs more of Minnesota Carr to show up, and I don’t disagree if what they mean is what Texas got today; Carr spent a large portion of today running downhill towards the rim and finding open teammates. The more Carr is running north/south instead of east/west, the more effective he is. The team is better when he touches the paint.

A significant chunk of Texas’ offensive/turnover woes have to do with how they pass the ball in the paint. If I had a dollar for every time a guard bounce-passed to a big’s shins I would be writing this recap from Mallorca. The irony is that the bigs seem to be better at passing in the paint than the guards; Allen, Cunningham, and Mitchell do a solid job with passing around the defenders, maybe they could lead a practice where they show the guards that their jersey number is in fact not 18 inches off the ground.

Can we just rename him Baby Wangmene already? Every time a guard fires a hard pass at Bishop it either flies off his hands or into the stands, sometimes both.

Bishop caught a lob in the air and I audibly gasped; partly because he caught it at all and partly because it seemed like after 22 games at least one of the guards realized he needs a softer pass to remember how to bring his ten fingers together on both sides of the ball and press onto the sphere, thus completing a catch like the world’s most-tattooed toddler.

Febres is 1-11 from three in conference play and it’s not like he’s taking closely contested shots. He’s not good enough defensively to make up for being a net-negative on offense, they need to get him going or sit him. I don’t know which is the correct answer; both sides have merit but only one of them makes this team appreciably better.

When I came up with my predictions for the final 16 games of the season (currently 6-2, I missed on the Kansas State and Tennessee games) my basic hypothesis was as follows: Texas is probably going to lose to the top 15 teams in the country, they’re probably going to beat the teams ranked 30 or below, and the 16-29 teams will be about matchups & tendencies. They’re 6-4 in conference play because they’ve mostly followed this pattern, the problem at hand is they have 5 of their last 8 games against top-15 teams. I have a hard time seeing them more than one of those 5 games - though if Baylor doesn’t get healthy that math can change - which means their conference record maxes out at 10-8. It also means they need to take care of business against the other three teams; Oklahoma and WVU are sliding pretty hard right now, and while I don’t think Texas will replicate the beatdown they laid on TCU they should still be solid favorites. 10-8 feels about right, I’d be more surprised by 11-7 than 9-9 but both are plausible. Any of those three records gets Texas into March Madness.

Monday, February 7th: vs Kansas 8:00 PM CT (ESPN)

Saturday, February 12th: at Baylor 11:00 AM CT (ESPN2)

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