Welcome to Bevo’s Fake Nuts, our weekly-ish column on the Texas Longhorns.
College football’s national championship is tonight, making it an evening of rest for the Longhorn faithful. Well-deserved, too, after what Chris Beard’s team did in Stillwater.
First of all, you guys are overblowing this. Losing a road game to a conference opponent—especially one who’s pretty solid, like Oklahoma State—isn’t a big deal. Teams do that all the time. Duke lost at home on Saturday to a team trying to scrap its way into the NIT, and while I’ve been successful in eliminating all Duke communication from my world, I’d assume they aren’t as existentially fearful about this as you guys were about missing sixteen threes on a Saturday afternoon. Was beating Kansas State in Manhattan not enough for you? Does your hunger have no end??
It was, to be fair, a dreadful performance in the scoring department. More turnovers than assists, only seven free throw attempts, all those missed threes—classic stuff. One of the funnier stats is that Texas was soundly beaten by a team which shot just 34% inside the arc. Another funny one is that Keylan Boone was two buckets away from outscoring every single two-Longhorn combo you could choose, posting a career day in a slow-tempo game after getting all kinds of run against the UMass-Lowells and Cleveland States of the world. It was one of those games of which you say, “Pee-yoo!” and move on. Except…
Texas has been doing this a lot. In games against power conference foes and Gonzaga, Texas is below the Division-I average in points per possession, and would be below one point per possession had the second half against the Zags gone like the first, in which Texas’s hosts blew them out of the gym before settling into a jog for their twenty-minute victory lap. Texas isn’t a good offensive team. They aren’t bad offensively—they aren’t, well, Oklahoma State—but they also aren’t good at scoring the basketball. And really…what did you expect?
Chris Beard never had good offensive teams at Texas Tech. That team that reached the “national championship” had a great defense, and his other teams were good on defense (as are the Longhorns), but Chris Beard is not some offensive mastermind. He’s a good recruiter (especially of transfers, especially to Texas), his teams are tough defensively, and they can play some of the ugliest offense you can imagine even when things are going well. That’s what you hired. If you didn’t like it, you should’ve asked Nate Oats to name his price.
As anyone who’s ever slopped up a steak will tell you, people can change. Chris Beard can change. Texas can become a good offensive program under his care. But it’s probably not happening this year. This year, expect a lot more second halves like that one in Stillwater than the one in Spokane.
