Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our more or less weekly column on the Texas Longhorns.
Texas’s nonconference men’s basketball season is more or less over, with just that Big 12/SEC Challenge game against Tennessee remaining, and that not for a few more weeks. It’s been a long, arduous road, one that despite featuring a trip to Spokane to play Gonzaga still grades out among the weakest nonconference schedules played by any team in Division I men’s hoops. From blowing out Houston Baptist in Austin on opening night to blowing out Incarnate Word in Austin last night, the Longhorns again and again neglected to test themselves, and on the rare occasions when they played someone any good, they lost. You cannot find a worse 10-2 résumé than that of Texas, because a worse 10-2 résumé than that of Texas cannot possibly exist.
It’s against this backdrop that Texas prepares to begin conference play, where they’ll host West Virginia on Saturday in a game hundreds if not maybe a couple thousand people are expected to attend. Eleven in the morning on New Year’s Day? Not happening.
West Virginia is a fine team, which is probably the case with two thirds of Texas’s league-mates this year. Oklahoma? Fine. Oklahoma State? Fine. TCU? Fine. Kansas State? Fine. Even Iowa State, undefeated and ranked in the top ten, is probably just fine. Texas Tech, like Texas, is solid but not great. Kansas, unlike Texas, is good but not great. Baylor is great. Baylor is the best team in the country. Baylor appears capable of pulverizing Texas. This brings me a little joy.
What, then, should we expect from Texas, in the midst of this landscape? It’s hard to say. Every game is losable. Almost every game is winnable. The Horns could tick off win after win and find themselves 16-2 in the Big 12. Disaster could strike and Texas could wind up around .500 overall. There are paths to the bubble. There are paths to one of the funniest NIT berths in recent memory (and there are a lot of funny NIT berths in recent memory).
If I were to place a personal guess—not saying I’m placing it, just saying if I were to place it—I’d guess Texas would sleepwalk to a win over West Virginia, drop one on the ensuing road trip to Manhattan and Stillwater, then rattle off a bunch of wins before getting smacked in Lubbock at the beginning of February. From there, the wheels would come off, with the Horns only winning once in the month of February, against either Tech in the rematch or TCU at home. They’d enter the Big 12 Tournament 8-10 in the league but 19-12 overall, comfortably above the NIT line but in entirely uninspiring territory. They’d lose by a ton in that tournament’s second round or lose narrowly in the first. An uneasy quiet would settle over the few people who noticed, especially with Shaka Smart winning the CBI up at Marquette.
Again, this isn’t a guess. It’s a hypothetical guess. But that’s where we’re looking right now. Good luck, Texas. You’ll need it.
