AUSTIN — Ending a three-game, season-opening homestand at the Moody Center, the No. 7 Texas Longhorns played 32 minutes of good basketball against the Grambling State Tigers in a 93-62 win on Monday.
The final eight minutes? Let’s talk about those later.
It is still the first time since the 2023-04 season that the Horns have opened a year with three straight wins of 30-plus points, an accomplishment that points to the opponents Texas has faced as much as its own performance, though there have certainly
been plenty of positives for head coach Sean Miller’s team in his second year on the Forty Acres.
On Sunday in San Antonio, the Longhorns encounter their first major challenge against Scott Drew’s Bears.
For now, here are three takeaways from the win.
Matas Vokietaitis has improved his fouling issues
As a freshman at Florida Atlantic, Matas Vokietaitis averaged 6.1 fouls per 40 minutes, a major contributing factor to averaging 17.6 minutes per game for the Owls. After transferring to Texas, Vokietaitis saw his fouls per game increase, but his foul rate decrease to 5.3 per 40 minutes. Once again, however, his foul rate limited the time he could spend on the court to 26 minutes per game. Not a naturally strong shot blocker, the lack of discipline from Vokietaitis put a low ceiling on his ability as a help defender and a post defender.
This is the point at which a reader should engage in their preferred superstitious behavior because Vokietaitis only has five fouls across 65 minutes in the first three games this season.
Consider Miller someone who believes in jinxes, especially with Baylor looming on Sunday.
“He is smarter — that’s the gift of experience,” Miller said.
Thirty-seven games and counting. Hundreds of practices with the same coaching staff. A better familiarity with the staff’s terminology as a native Lithuanian.
“I think all of that is really to his benefit,” Miller said.
Vokietaitis is now combining that experience with his love for the game and his impressive work ethic. An offseason spent working more on defense than his offense put an emphasis on defending with his chest and his legs instead of using his hands or bringing his arms down and negating the positioning he can gain and maintain with his 7’0, 255-pound frame.
Against Grambling, Vokietaitis faced his first real challenge of the season defending 7’2 forward Isaiah Miranda, who scored 28 points in the season opener and is a former top-50 prospect in the 2022 class offered by Chris Beard at Texas prior to stops at NC State, Oklahoma State, Wisconsin-Green Bay, and LIU.
A willing three-point shooter, Miranda forced Vokietaitis to defend on the perimeter.
“I think he did nothing to me,” Vokietaitis said.
Miranda missed all eight of his three-point attempts, needed 13 shots to score eight points, and also committed two turnovers as Texas took away his opportunities on the short roll because the Longhorns center extended high on the team’s hard hedges and a third player tagged Miranda after his ball screen.
Vokietaitis finished with one foul in 23 minutes.
Joe Sterling has arrived
Three games into the college career of the freshman guard, the Moody Center crowd already expects every three from Joe Sterling to go in. There’s good reason — Sterling is 7-of-11 shooting from deep (63.6 percent), and most of his makes hit nothing but the bottom of the net.
Purity.
Grambling State head coach Patrick Crarey mistook Sterling for fellow freshman guard Bo Odgen in his post-game press conference after Sterling went 3-of-4 shooting from beyond the arc, but it’s understandable in the sense that even Miller puts the two players into a similar category as shooters.
And yet, Ogden isn’t quite in the same category as Sterling for the Texas head coach with more than two decades leading college basketball programs.
“In my time, he’s as good of a shooter as I’ve been around. I really mean that because when you’re coaching a guy, you see him in all forms — in practice every day, after practice, before practice, or any player development drills. How does he stack up? And then obviously, the real test is what it feels like in games, and he’s been really consistent shooting the ball,” Miller said.
Sterling’s signature headband should make him easy to distinguish from Odgen, but there are only two inches in height that separate the two players — the California sharpshooter can regularly get off his shots because of his quick release and his height, a major advantage over so many smaller shooters. Defending Sterling is complicated by his ability to shoot off the catch, off the move, and off the bounce.
After spending months seeing Sterling knock down shots — “That’s my dude,” Isaiah Johnson said last week — the Longhorns understand their responsibility to recognize Sterling’s ability as a passing target.
“It’s like he runs around with a red dot on his head — is he open? If he’s open, you’ve got to find him,” Miller said. “That becomes our collective responsibility to free him up, to find him in transition, and allow him to really have a lot of confidence.”
Even though Sterling was underrecruited, his shooting received top billing.
What’s been a bigger surprise is his defense with three steals in three games, stats that don’t do true justice to his disruptiveness, a skill that places him among the team’s leaders in steals and deflections tracked every time the Longhorns are on the court, from practice to scrimmages and to games.
“You may not think that, but he’s deceptive with his size, and he has just great instincts,” Miller said.
“We believed in him — that’s why we brought him to Texas, but just his maturity, his ability to make shots, and, again, to do the other things around making shots that make him a solid player. He’s really off to a great start for us.”
The Longhorns have to finish better
In his post-game press conference, the biggest overall positive that Crarey pointed to was the ability of his Grambling team to only narrowly lose the second half, 38-35.
The surge mostly came from a four-minute stretch during which the Tigers outscored the Longhorns 17-2, part of a 19-6 finish to the game that Miller described as a let down.
“As you get moving forward here, you’ve got to play for 40 minutes. You have to be good at the end, the beginning, and that’s the standard,” Miller said.
Throughout the offseason and most of the first three games, the Longhorns have earned the trust of their head coach, who believes that they understand their goals and identity, and that they’re on track. Miller saw that from his team’s reaction to his post-game comments about the need to finish better.
“I didn’t have to wake them up — there was nobody in my mind shaking their head after I left the locker room, saying, ‘Man, he’s never happy.‘ I think they they see it for what it is,” Miller said.
For the Texas head coach, playing hard and with focus for 40 minutes every game is a prerequisite for the greatness the Longhorns hopes to achieve this season. And it’s notable the extent to which he already trusts a team that almost entirely turned over from last year.
“I believe that message was delivered and received.”
