For the fifth time in the last six games, the Texas Longhorns suffered a defeat, falling to the No. 15 Ole Miss Rebels in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Wednesday in Nashville in a disappointing effort that saw the Horns fall behind early and never fully recover in trailing the entire game.
With Selection Sunday looming, Texas has skidded to the finish line, seeing its tournament odds fall from 91.6 percent after the win over Texas A&M in College Station 13 days to 33.9 percent on Thursday,
according to Bart Torvik.
Senior guard Jordan Pope struck an optimistic note in the post-game press conference at Bridgestone Arena.
“I believe our resume shows a lot, even though we have some bad losses, we’re a really good basketball team,” Pope said.
Texas has one Quad 3 loss, to Mississippi State at home in the SEC opener, and four Quad 2 losses, but also has six Quad 1 wins. For ESPN Bracketologist Joe Lunardi, that’s enough for the Longhorns to slot as one of the last four teams in the field, enough to make another trip to Dayton for the First Four. Overall, head coach Sean Miller’s team now appears in 95 of the 98 brackets tracked by BracketMatrix.com.
Miller, for his part, is at peace with whatever fate awaits his team on Sunday.
“I have zero anxiety entering the weekend, simply because of this — I came to Texas to build a championship program. There’s steps and foundations that have to be laid. Processes, failure, really learning what the SEC is really about. This has been very rewarding and enlightening and when you get to the finality of it, whatever happens, I’m at peace,” Miller said.
It’s a statement that sounds like a pre-eulogy for a team heading to hospice care with a terminal illness, perhaps the very fouling plague that has afflicted the Horns this season with its co-morbidity of bad defense.
So there’s a sense from Miller that the defining “failure” of not making the tournament and the contrasting success of making it and losing in the First Four or the first round aren’t meaningfully different.
“In terms of my stress level, we’ve fought the good fight, and now we have to wait for the results,” Miller said.
Whatever those results are, Miller is right that the foundation of this Texas program is what matters, and it’s clear that what is in place currently from a personnel standpoint is not enough to build a championship structure on top of it, which means that the roster construction process that will officially begin on April 7 when the NCAA transfer portal opens is exponentially more important than whatever happens on Sunday or in the tournament if the Longhorns make the field.
