The Texas Longhorns find themselves in familiar territory against a familiar opponent — for the second year in a row, Texas finds itself in the First Four of the NCAA Tournament, playing for the right to enter the field of 64.
Standing between them and a matchup with the No. 6 seed BYU Cougars is the NC State Wolfpack, a team Texas beat in the first month of the season.
After building a 10-point halftime lead, the Longhorns had to hold off a late push from the Wolfpack to close out the Maui Invitational
with a 102-97 win, their second-highest point total of the year. The bad part is that it was also their third-worst performance on the defensive end of the court and one of just three wins when allowing more than 80 points.
It appears to be a toss-up game, with ESPN’s Matchup Predictor showing the Wolfpack with a 50.2-percent chance to win the game, while FanDuel lists Texas as a 1.5-point favorite.
While Texas is far from a lock, there is a clear path to a win for them in the opening round, with the recipe already revealed in the early-season win over NC State. If the Horns can repeat that formula, they’ll find their way to the Round of 64.
Three-point shooting
Texas is far from the hottest three-point team in the country, but you wouldn’t have known that if all you watched was the previous game against the Wolfpack. In Maui, Texas shot, and made, more three pointers than any other game this year, hitting 50 percent and scoring 48 points from behind the arc. Compare that to the disastrous end of the season when they had just one game where they reached 50 percent from beyond the arc, a 6-of-12 performance in an uncompetitive loss to Georgia in Athens.
Senior guard Jordan Pope was a driving factor in Texas’ performance in that early-season win, going 7-of-13 from long range, scoring 21 of his 28 points in the contest from distance. While Pope has had other big shooting performances from three, including the upset road win over Alabama and the home overtime loss to Oklahoma to close the regular season, other aspects of that performance in Hawaii haven’t been as sustainable.
Senior guard Chendall Weaver made three threes in that win, 30 percent of his season total entering the tournament. For junior guard Simeon Wilcher, hitting three triples isn’t as much of an outlier — he has also made three three-pointers against Lafayette and Kansas City — but he hasn’t done it since Maui.
And junior forward Cam Heide, who joined Weaver and Wilcher in making three shots from beyond the arc, has been in a shooting slump. Even towards the end of the team’s five-game winning streak in February, Heide was starting to cool off, and he’s 4-for-20 (20 percent) from distance over the last eight games.
Run the floor, spread the floor
The Maui Invitational tilt against NC State could be characterized as either an offensive explosion or defensive malpractice, but either way, both teams put up a ton of points. Texas did a great job of pushing the pace and spreading the ball around in the matchup, setting a pace that kept them ahead of their defensive struggles in the contest. They scored 24 points on the fast break against NC State, compared to the Wolfpack’s seven, creating explosive scoring opportunities often.
Not only did they run the floor, but they distributed the ball well in the game, dishing out 18 assists, seven from the hands of junior Dailyn Swain. That was the fourth-highest number of the year, with Texas assisting on 62.1 percent of its made baskets in the game, keeping the ball moving and making smart passes.
Control the paint
Texas’s biggest deficiency in their first matchup against NC State was their inability to stop the Wolfpack when they got close to the basket. The Longhorns gave up 46 points in the paint against NC State, while Texas managed just 20 in the contest. Part of the issue with that may have been the struggles of Heide and sophomore center Matas Vokietaitis and Cam Heide, who were both limited by foul trouble and were eventually disqualified.
Despite that, the Longhorns did a good job of getting themselves to the line and converting, going 28-of-33 from the charity stripe. They finished with a free throw rate of 61.5 percent, one of six games where Texas shot free throws on at least 60 percent of their field-goal attempts. Texas was 5-1 in those contests, with the lone loss coming in overtime against Mississippi State.
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