“We play Ole Miss, and that’s it. The picture is no bigger than that for us.”
In the wake of Saturday’s 88-85 overtime loss to the Oklahoma Sooners at the Moody Center, Texas Longhorns head coach Sean Miller narrowed the focus for his team.
It’s not about winning one or two games in the SEC Tournament, beginning with a Wednesday matchup against the No. 15 seed Ole Miss Rebels at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, to solidify a bid to the NCAA Tournament.
It’s not about whether Texas can avoid a First Four
appearance for a second straight season.
It’s only about bouncing back from that disappointing loss and beating Ole Miss while Miller tries to coax better results out of his team on both ends of the court.
“In March, you’re not going to advance just playing one side of the ball. That could be defense, that could be offense. You’ve got to be good at both, and you’ve got to play with amazing, sustainable effort. We’ve had a hard time doing that since I got here,” Miller admitted on Saturday.
Against Oklahoma, the normally efficient Texas offense, which relies on scoring from two and getting fouled, had some bad turnovers and struggled to get clean, good shots, contributing to 25 shot attempts by senior guard Jordan Pope, who often had to create on his own at the end of the shot clock.
Defensively, the issues looked all too familiar for the Longhorns — the Sooners got to the line for 34 free-throw attempts and guards Xzayvier Brown and Nijel Pack combined for 44 points and made five of the seven three-pointers for Oklahoma.
And when Texas needed to come up with critical loose balls, it didn’t happen.
“You always evaluate the game on those hustle plays, like four to six loose balls, big rebounds. I’m not sure we got any of them,” Miller said.
Against weaker opponents like Ole Miss, Texas has been able to close games well, particularly during the five-game winning streak that included the 79-68 win over the Rebels in Austin in early February. In the victory, the Horns closed the game on a 16-3 run over the final 3:59 with hot shooting and effective defense — Texas made seven of its last nine shots from floor and forced seven straight missed shots by Ole Miss to finish the game.
Sophomore center Matas Vokietaitis turned in a dominant performance for the Longhorns, scoring a game-high 27 points on 9-of-11 shooting from the floor and 9-of-12 shooting from the free-throw line. As the Rebels took an unusual approach defensively, setting some traps in the halfcourt and loading gaps to slow down junior wing Dailyn Swain, who only scored seven points and turned the ball over four times, Vokietaitis was able to take advantage of the the space afforded by the Ole Miss gameplan.
Like most wins this season for Miller’s team, it was hardly a complete performance — after the Longhorns took a 12-point lead into halftime, Ole Miss responded with a 12-4 run and eventually made nine consecutive shots to open the second half as the Texas defense never made it out of the locker room.
The loss to Texas came in the midst of a 10-game losing streak for Ole Miss, which finished 4-14 in SEC play, the worst conference record for Chris Beard in his 13 full seasons as a head coach as the Rebels will miss the NCAA Tournament for the second time in his three seasons in Oxford barring an unlikely run to the conference tournament title.
By the standards of Beard and longtime assistant coach Mark Adams, the Ole Miss defense is a massive disappointment, ranking near the bottom of the country in defensive rebounding and opposing free-throw rate, weaknesses that Texas exploited in Austin for 20 second-chance points and 23 free-throw attempts.
In more typical Beard fashion, the offense isn’t particularly good — the Rebels protect the ball well, but don’t do much else competently except hit free throws at 75.1 percent.
Tip is at 6 p.m. Central on SEC Network with Texas holding a 69-percent win probability.
