Another one.
The Game
Iowa State @ Texas
The Time
7:00 PM Central
The Television
Longhorn Network
The Opponent
Texas. Maybe not the fourth-best team in college basketball, but close enough for everyone to agree to call them that.
The Numbers
Vegas has the Cyclones 12.5-point underdogs, with the over/under at 140. KenPom’s projecting a 77-63 Longhorn win, with a Longhorn win by any margin 90% likely.
What Iowa State Needs to Do
Texas’s defense, as good as it is, doesn’t force many turnovers. It isn’t geared towards that style of play, and thank goodness it isn’t. It does prohibit ball movement, but it’s not like Iowa State does much of that anyway, and it forces teams to try to score inside but if Royce Hamm’s still out, Texas’s front line’s going to be somewhat thin, so there might be an avenue for hope here in the form of a big night from Solomon Young.
On the other end, it’ll be interesting to see if Tre Jackson’s really sparking a defensive revival, or if this weekend was just a mirage. Texas doesn’t have the offensive heft Baylor boasts. They’re prone to spells of missing shots, and a lot of what they do comes from extending possessions through offensive rebounding. That could be a recipe for disaster for ISU—by all measures a bad rebounding team—but again, if Jackson’s really the spark that was needed, there’s at least a convincing path to a major upset here.
As usual, though, the attainable goal is progress. Better ball movement. Fewer turnovers. Better rebounding. Less chucking. A similar game script to that which played out against Baylor—thirty minutes of tenacity followed by ten minutes of slipping away—wouldn’t be the worst thing for the hopes going forward, though as we’ve said at times, wins might be necessary in some quantity to keep these next months from being an impossible task for player motivation.
We’ll see.
