At the midway point of SEC play, the Texas Longhorns are firmly on the NCAA Tournament bubble as the last team in the field of Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology after opening a winnable stretch of games with Saturday’s 10-point victory over the Oklahoma Sooners in Norman prior to hosting the South Carolina Gamecocks at the Moody Center on Tuesday.
Next Saturday, disgraced former head coach Chris Beard brings his scuffling Ole Miss team to the Forty Acres, followed by a road game against Missouri and a home
matchup against LSU. A win probability of 50 percent for the game in Columbia the lowest of that stretch for the Longhorns, creating an imperative for first-year head coach Sean Miller’s team to at least protect home court at the Moody Center.
Even a win on Tuesday would represent just the second time in conference play that Texas has won back-to-back games and the only winning streak longer than that came early in the season when the Longhorns notched four straight games against some of the worst teams in the country.
But since the 14-point loss to Tennessee in Knoxville in which Texas struggled to compete, Miller’s team has had chances to win every other game, including in hostile environments like Rupp Arena in Lexington and Neville Arena in Auburn.
After taking an eight-point lead into halftime against the Tigers, however, the game got away from the Longhorns in the second half because Texas committed 18 fouls that led to 28 free-throw attempts for Auburn.
“Not a lot else changed, but what really changed is their free-throw attempts,” Miller said in an appearance on On Texas Football. “It’s not eight fouls that we’re trying to get rid of, it’s the two, three, or four undisciplined fouls that we can correct, that we are working hard to correct.”
Those several undisciplined fouls add up quickly in close games — in the four SEC loses outside of the poor effort against the Volunteers, the Longhorns have lost by an average of 4.5 points.
“That’s four free-throw attempts. They didn’t get into bonus as early. There’s a huge swing when you can foul less in college basketball, and I think that’s plagued our defense, and we could be a better overall defensive team. I’ve told our guys on a daily basis, if the number goes in the right direction defensively for us, a lot of the things that we’re hunting and going after will come true, but we’re only going to go as far on this path as our defensive improvement allows us,” Miller said.
Texas currently ranks 297th in opposing free-throw rate.
The single player Miller needs to make strides in fouling less over the final nine SEC games is sophomore center Matas Vokietaitis, who is averaging 5.2 fouls per 40 minutes.
“He gets fouled as much as any player that plays college basketball, so the spotlight is always on him — that means you have to be even more disciplined and smarter when it’s your turn to defend. There are times to be physical and there’s times to let it go, and there’s times that you have to show your hands and go vertical, and there’s times when you have to do a lot of work with your legs and your chest, your torso, and not your hands. We’ve had a hard time, truth be told, with Matas in that area, but he’s better than he was, for example, when we played in the Maui Invitational,” Miller said.
Vokietaitis is also better than he was last year as a freshman at Florida Atlantic in his first season playing basketball in the United States, cutting his fouling by almost a full foul per 40 minutes.
For the Texas team, however, a worse forced turnover rate than opposing free-throw rate is a bad duo.
“We don’t force turnovers and we foul — that’s a wicked combination. Teams that don’t force turnovers can win big, but you cannot foul,” Miller said on Monday.
The other area defensively that the Longhorns need to improve in is three-point defense. Texas is limiting opponents to a three-point rate of 35.6 percent, 60th nationally, but allowing opponents to make 35.4 percent of those attempts 258th nationally.
Because the Horns have a low three-point rate and an even lower assist rate, the degree of difficulty for those three-point attempts is heightened because they often come off the dribble, and the combination of allowing that level of efficiency from opponents and not making up for it in volume can create large margins like the Hoos notching a 24-point edge in points off threes in their 19-point win in December.
But despite those weaknesses offensively, Miller and his staff have managed to create the most efficient offense at Texas since DJ Augustin and Damion James led the Longhorns to the Elite Eight in 2007-08, an attack built primarily on getting to the free-throw line and scoring in the paint.
And it’s not just Vokietaitis buoying those areas of success — junior wing Dailyn Swain has also attempted more than 100 free throws so far this season and taken even more shots around the rim than the big Lithuanian.
Over the last four games, Swain has been sensational, averaging 25.8 points, 7.3 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 2.5 steals while shooting 64.9 percent from the floor, 44.4 percent from three, and 87.5 percent from the free-throw line.
Already one of the most dangerous players in the country off the bounce, Swain’s ability to shoot threes effectively is a force multiplier for his game, especially in bailing Texas out of poor possessions in late-clock situations.
The shooting improvement has taken a lot of hard work behind the scenes from Swain, whose high-major interest out of high school in Columbus was limited by his lack of shooting range.
“It wasn’t that he couldn’t shoot or you didn’t like the way his shot looked like, he basically ignored that part of the game. He did it really almost through his entire time in high school,” Miller said.
After signing with Xavier, Swain was 4-of-26 shooting from three as a freshman (15.4 percent) before showing some signs of improvement in making seven of his 28 attempts last season (25 percent). In practice, Miller and his staff spent a year and a half forcing the talented wing to shoot open threes, leading to enough improvement that he gained the confidence to take and make them in games — he’s now a 31.7-percent shooter this season and at 35.5 percent in SEC play.
As an almost 80 percent career shooter from the free-throw line, Swain’s ability to convert those opportunities gave Miller hope that he could eventually add a three-point shot to his game. Now he has, and it’s made him one of the most efficient scorers in the nation’s best basketball conference.
South Carolina arrives in Austin with just two SEC wins, coming against LSU on the road and Oklahoma at home, leaving the Gamecocks at 15th in the conference in adjusted efficiency. But as the overtime loss to Mississippi State in the conference opener revealed a month ago, Texas can play poorly enough to lose to anyone, especially if the team is giving up a lot of three-pointers to opposing guards or debilitated by its fouling virus.
So Miller is emphasizing what the Longhorns need to do to win rather than focusing on the opponent specifically.
“We just have to be at our best. Period. I think it’s like a nameless, faceless league. On your end, your preparation, your readiness, how you attack the game, how you play, you’ve got to be at your best, and the more you can be at your best, the better opportunity you have for success. So the only thing that’s different about this week is we have back-to-back home games. Other than that, I think we have to look at this — this is an SEC team and we all know what that is,” Miller said.
Tip is at 6 p.m. Central on SEC Network with Texas boasting an 85-percent win probability, according to Bart Torvik.
