One of the aspects of college basketball that is objectively better than football is that they rarely schedule non-conference games more than a year out. It provides a flexibility that football cannot match; while Texas football is scheduling a home & home against Notre Dame in the mid-2030s - at which point they’re probably conference opponents - the basketball team is able to setup their schedule in early summer each year to take advantage of playing tougher teams when they know they’ll actually be tough. (Contrast that to when the Texas/USC rematches were scheduled, as an example.) Most years this works out beautifully, especially as basketball programs are generally rewarded for beefing up their strength of schedule come tournament time. Add in the yearly conference tie-ins (Big 12/SEC, Big 12/Big East, etc.) and there are generally good matchups each year for high-major teams.

Yea, about that..

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc in everyone’s world in innumerable ways, but the blank slate of each program’s non-conference slate has been impacted significantly more than their football counterparts. There have been many attempts at bridging this gap with things like multi-team events (MTEs) in Orlando headed by ESPN Events, which were abandoned in late October because - I hope you’re sitting down - different conferences couldn’t agree on player testing parameters. College basketball tried to bubble, and for the most part failed. This hurt programs up and down the ladder; high-major teams were scrambling for opponents who could test to their satisfaction, mid-major and lower teams were suddenly out of ‘buy’ games which are financed by high-major teams with attendance revenue which won’t be available, and so on and so on. It has been chaos; I’m writing this on Halloween (because I like to party) and half of the power conference programs still haven’t released their official non-conference schedules.

Texas hasn’t released an official schedule as of this writing, but I think they’re probably pretty close to done. The NCAA reduced the minimum (and maximum) number of games necessary on a schedule to qualify for the tourney and most power conference programs are slicing games off their non-con to get down to a lower number of total games. I expect to see a lot of 25-26 game schedules this year, down ~5 from your average year. The Big 12 has their 18-game conference schedule, which means each of their teams is only looking for 7-8 non-con games rather than their usual 13 or so. With what I know and what I think I know, this should be their schedule:

This season is going to cut a lot of fluff from high-major schedules. Texas isn’t alone in padding their schedule with a handful of ‘buy’ games where they rack up wins against lower-level opponents to make the win total look better, and that section of the basketball ecosystem looks to be dead this year. Revenue shortfalls have all sorts of impacts, and even at a school where revenue is enormous they hit a lot of snags when fans aren’t allowed into the arena en masse. I mean, as much as anyone shows up to a Texas basketball game en masse. /triple rimshot (This joke will make sense in a later piece. Probably.) There’s a possibly unintended benefit that between conference play and this schedule, Texas has a decent shot at having one of the best strength-of-schedule ranking in the country. There are at least two top-ten opponents in this list, plus a chance at a couple other tournament-level teams.

If this were a normal year, I would put Texas as a significant underdog and call it a day. Rupp Arena is the Phog but bigger and with more Judds, and it’s a hard place for any team to win. When you add in that this game is happening a couple of days before Texas plays Baylor in Austin, it seems like a place where things could really fall apart if the squad isn’t on its game. That said, Kentucky is limiting attendance to 15% as of this writing so Rupp isn’t Rupp. They’ll probably only allow one Judd in attendance crosses fingers for Ashley and the crowd will only be as insane as normal in quality rather than quantity. Maybe Texas figures out a way to get through this game; the Wildcats will be - stop me if you’ve heard this before - talented but very young. Texas could conceivably be one of the only teams on their schedule who can match them athlete for athlete, so if the scouting is correct Texas could finagle a win by understanding their opponent better than the opponent understands them.

touches finger to ear

Oh, right, Jai Lucas is at Kentucky.

Fuck.

It’s worth noting that this game happens two days prior to Texas playing Baylor in Austin, so that ~48 hours could tell us a lot about Texas’ postseason aspirations. Or it could tell us nothing, because this program is Basketball Schrodinger’s Cat. I’m spending most of this season expecting the team to show us it might maybe almost be ready to think about possibly considering doing something at the verge of notable, possibly.

What if Texas big money donors took their Tom Herman cash and offered Villanova $20m to take Shaka and then offered Jay Wright $10m/year to coach at Texas?

Anybody?

Is this thing on?

Well, worth a shot.

Jay Wright is arguably the best coach in college basketball right now, he’s won two titles in the past four years and he was projected to be a two-seed last season prior to everything being shut down. He’s one of the few coaches in the NCAA able to recruit to a five-out perimeter shooting team, and he has an impressive enough resume that he can (and has) turn down NBA teams whenever he feels like. I guess what I’m saying is that Wildcats fans are lucky AF; I would personally measure Jay Wright’s inseam for his custom suits if it helped get him to Austin. I might measure it any way, though I’m woke enough I understand I need affirmative consent to make it happen. Maybe I start an Inception quest in the first class flight between Philly and LA where I implant the idea of him really needing a new suit and that my living room is the Kingsman tailor shop.

I might have thought about this too much.

Schedule Link

I guess I should put this more as ‘potential litmus test’ since there’s a chance Texas moves through this tourney without hitting multiple significant programs. Maybe Texas goes Davidson - Providence - UNLV and it doesn’t help their metrics as much as Davidson - Indiana - UNC would, in which case this is a marginally less helpful tourney. I still think Texas is likely to run across at least one March Madness-level team out of the eight, if not two or three. Plus, they’ll be spending their nights in the tropical paradise of….Asheville, North Carolina. Who among us could discern the difference between the land-locked NC town and Maui? Everybody? Alright, fine. Congratulations on your basic grasp of geography, I hope you enjoy your vinegar and/or mustard-based BBQ reward. I’m assuming their chili has beans in it as well, so get that gassy protein all up in your guts.

This team lost twice last year to another team lower on this list, so that should probably set the table enough on its own. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t use this team as a launching point to remind everyone that Texas hired a coach from the G League Rio Grande Valley affiliate in Nevada Smith, a name which is a movie title and also the last four men to win the World Series of Poker. I should also mention that in 2018 UT-RGV gave Texas Tech a test, and after seeing the quality of player in RGV Tech went on a run to OT in the national championship game. So let’s just go ahead and say that beating UT-RGV = natty title appearance, because that’s just math.

Danny Kaspar turned the Bobcats around, going from 8-23 in his first season to a program that had won 20+ games in three of the last four seasons. He was set to start season number eight until a Title IX investigation was opened into uhh, controversial statements he made regularly in practices which included saying things that resulted in him deploying the “why can’t I use that word, you guys use it” defense, which when you’re a 65-year-old white man coaching mostly minority athletes, is always a sign your argument is on sound footing. He ‘resigned’ in late September, and the program promoted assistant coach Terrence Johnson for the season. (Side note: if you’re trying to distance your program from a guy, maybe don’t make the main photo for your interim head coach a photo that prominently features the old guy. Just saying.)

That one’s on the house, Terrence.

Also, not for nothing but the more I look at photos of Mario’s face the more concerned I am about his mustache. There’s no way that thing is comfortable, it’s practically inside his nose. Is…is it made of nose hair? Have I led most of my life wrongly believing that was a mustache and not a genetic condition where his nose hair grows uncontrollably? How often does he have to trim it, daily? Hourly? Is this why Princess Peach keeps sequestering herself in unattainable castles, to avoid the horror of pounds of Nostril Hair Mario, inundated with the aroma of a sweaty Italian who spent days running through sewers and dungeons with no showers along the way, coming in for a kiss while drenched in the offal of a dead dinosaur-sized turtle? This is going to bother me all night.

Jason Hooten has coached Sam Houston State for a decade and never made the NCAA Tournament. Being in a one-bid league like the Southland Conference, that’s probably not a shock; there are decent coaches who put together good regular seasons - like in 2019 when his team went 16-2 in conference play - only to get bounced in the conference tournament in an upset and be relegated elsewhere. That team lost to New Orleans in an upset in their conference tourney and followed it up by getting bounced by TCU in the first round of the NIT. This is the same year Texas bounced TCU to claim the FINAL EVER NIT CHAMPIONSHIP, so there’s an alternate timeline where the Bearkats meet up with Texas and get Snoop Roach dunking in their face for 40 minutes. I guess what I’m saying is being a mid-major kinda sucks.

All I know about this school is that my girlfriend’s sister went there for some sort of marine biology degree that involved her tracking whales and asking us to financially support their tracking of whales. She now works in DC for Trump, trying to kill the whales she learned how to track on my dime. Nature is healing.

I hesitate to discuss the non-con separate from the conference schedule because they’re more intertwined than normal this season, with Texas playing two Big 12 opponents before 2021 kicks into gear and one of these games happening at the end of January. I think it’s fair to say Texas should win at least four of the seven, with the Kentucky & Villanova games being the most important on their schedule. That said, if they manage to take one (or more) of the UK/Nova/UNC games then they might be showing a form which portends to a good season. If they struggle against the Texas directional schools, that could portend something else entirely. Or maybe all of these games get cancelled because North Carolina is the first wave of COVID-20, which is like COVID-19 but way more polite as it liquefies your innards. Southerners are the nicest people, even when they’re killing you.