Coming out of the holiday break, the Texas Longhorns host the Mississippi State Bulldogs on Saturday at the Moody in the SEC opener for both teams.
Having played 13 non-conference games and emerging with a 9-4 record, what are the realistic expectations for first-year head coach Sean Miller’s group embarking on the 18-game schedule in the nation’s best basketball conference?
“In terms of the goal, if I really felt like I had a bead on that. I probably would tell you,” Miller said on Friday. “I think
maybe a month out from today, or two or three weeks from today, you have a better sense.”
It’s a dodgy response from Miller, who is perhaps unwilling to provide a more candid assessment of a team that currently projects to finish 17-14 overall with an 8-10 record in SEC play and a 31.3-percent chance to make the NCAA Tournament, according to BartTorvik.com.
Where Miller is more honest about this Longhorns team is the inconsistent results on defense that often fail to meet the standards he is trying to establish in his program, ranging from communication to effort to matching up to take away easy threes in transition to playing with physicality on block outs to securing loose rebounds to avoid giving up extra possessions.
And that’s where Miller is willing to be more candid about his team.
“We don’t have the talented roster that can overcome any lack of in that area,” Miller said. “We don’t, and that doesn’t mean we don’t have good players, but our margin is very thin. Those are the plays that we have to make. We have to be a connected, hard-playing team.”
Those are two big admissions — about the difficulties of his initial roster build and the corresponding talent deficit resulting from that roster build, and the inability to get the consistent effort level and attention to detail defensively to be competitive.
There have been flashes of competitiveness, like hanging with Duke in the season opener and beating then-No. 23 NC State in the Maui Invitational. And there have been games in which Texas wasn’t competitive, like the blowout loss at home to Virginia and the final non-conference game, a 33-point win over a bad Maryland Eastern Shore team that Miller called the “worst performance of the season.”
Difficulties defending without fouling have been a particular source of frustration for Miller this season.
“Quite frankly, it’s a lack of discipline, a lack of concentration, and sometimes, quite frankly, a lack of effort, that leads to fouls,” Miller said.
The roster deficiencies have impacted the aggressiveness of that the Longhorns play with defensively. The nation’s No. 259 forced turnover rate is in some ways a concession to the team’s weaknesses, forcing a more passive ball-screen coverage that exacerbates the destructiveness of the team’s high foul rate.
“The way we play defense, where we’re not trying to force a ton of turnovers, we’re in drop coverage to some degree, we can’t foul the way we foul,” Miller said.
Another area of defensive deficiency is defending the three-point line, as the Longhorns rank 230th in allowing opponents to shoot 34.6 percent from beyond the arc.
“We’re not giving up a ton of three-point attempts, but the percentage that we’ve given up is too high, and that’s controllable — high hands on closeouts, players being in better position, more aware, and sometimes just sustaining effort towards the end of the possession. Like you play defense for 24 seconds, but it’s that last six seconds that you just cave in and give up a three in the open corner,” Miller said.
Over the break, Texas has emphasized defensive fundamentals, including ball-screen coverage, an area in which Miller wants to have more options than playing drop coverage so frequently.
“We’ve worked really hard on that. My hope is that you can see that tomorrow when we play the game,” Miller said.
For the Horns to make the NCAA Tournament, protecting home court to the greatest extent possible is an imperative, especially in a game against the Bulldogs that features an 81-percent win probability, tied for the highest in conference play.
In contrast, the following two road games against Tennessee (18 percent) and Alabama (14 percent), as well as the next home game against Vanderbilt (28 percent), illustrate the extent to which Texas will be significant statistical underdogs in a number of games.
That makes Saturday’s matchup against Mississippi State a must-win game to preserve the team’s relatively slim tournament hopes.
The Bulldogs do present some challenges, especially in the backcourt, which features the team’s three leading scorers — no one else averages more than center Quincy Ballard’s 6.9 points per game.
Junior guard Josh Hubbard’s 21.3 points per game rank second in the SEC — the Mississippi product is an efficient scorer and capable ball handler. Second-leading scorer Jayden Epps, a Georgetown transfer, is a pure scorer at 15.9 points per game who takes more than half of his shot attempts from three, rarely gets to the free-throw line, and doesn’t provide much playmaking for his teammates.
“They have two guards that I think could play anywhere in the country, not only play anywhere in the country, but be that team’s leading scorer,” Miller said. “Hubbard is fantastic. We’ve coached against Epps because he came from Georgetown.”
Two years ago, Epps had 20-point and 32-point performances against Miller’s Xavier team, including hitting all 11 of his free throws and recording 11 assists in one of the best games of his career when he had a role as a more primary ball handler.
“You want to be able to hold those guys under control as much as possible and that will be a big challenge for us tomorrow,” Miller said.
Like Texas, Mississippi State struggles to create turnovers defensively, but the Bulldogs do rank 58th in effective field-goal percentage and 51st in opposing free-throw rate. Offensively, head coach Chris Jans’ team struggles to get to the free-throw line and to take advantage when they do force fouls.
Tip is at 5 p.m. Central on SEC Network.
