HookEm

I like Mitchell. Dude crashes the boards like crazy. And his shot doesn't look that bad to me. If he was a 4-year player, I think he could be really really good two years from now. He has improved in every way over the last year. Over the last 8 games he is shooting 71% from the line. Last year he shot 41%. Also just want to say that this team is starting to show that they can play lockdown defense when they have the right lineup in. Abmas was getting after it today.

Arkansas should throw the checkbook at Beard. We are about to be in a conference with them, and it would just about guarantee they would kick our ass every year. And even when Arky isn't "great" they still support their team and are always in the top of the attendance marks. Someone like Beard could turn them into a serious power.

I still think it would be great if our players were walking around the court doing horns down to all the fans. F it. Make all horn symbols our own. That win was delicious. It felt like the refs were going to take it from us with the BS goaltending call. Good heart to close it out. If Abmas had been at UT all four years, he would go down as one of our favorite players ever. I mean, he just passed Danny Manning in points scored.

Disu ready to take this thang over

Onyema just isn't as relentless as he should be. If he gave the same effort on the glass as some of the bigs from UH and UCF, he would be a critical part of the rotation.

Houston has the look of a title team to me. Failing to win could really haunt us. Houston will likely be a 1 seed. That would have been a nice win come tourney selection time.

All those stats for Shedrick are cool, but my eyes tell me a different story, at least recently. The dude looks injured and has for a bit now. He isn’t running fluidly at all. And saying he has been our 3rd best defender isn’t saying much. We have played terrible defense for most of the season. I thought he looked pretty good early in the season, but maybe that was before he got hurt.

Our defense played a big part of that. Our guys were balling out. Looked similar to last year's intensity.

He reminds me of Russell Westbrook more than he reminds me of Brock Cunningham. But opinions can vary.

I'll be honest, I can't stand Shedrick's game. I thought we were getting a high level post defender and someone who could bang down low... and then shoot 80% FT. I thought he was going to be a big upgrade over Christian Bishop last year. That turned out to not be the case. He runs around flat footed. He is always out of position and seems lost on defense. He gets abused by bigger players. He gets abused by quicker players. He rebounds at a very poor rate. He doesn't hustle. On offense he is basically invisible. I forget he is out there. And about once a game, he hits the deck and lays there writhing in pain. Maybe all of it is because he is injured. I don't remember him looking this terrible at the start of the season. If you are f'ed up, I can see that it could make you timid and appear to be less athletic than you actually are.

Askew's main issue is that he plays recklessly and takes bad shots. He has a good stroke though and shot 87% from the line on pretty big volume last year. Beard would have had him playing under control and would have leveraged his strengths. He is a tough player and a solid defender, especially on bigger guards or small forwards. He has good vision. And with Beard's methodical, slow paced offense he would have gotten much better shots than what he got playing for suck ass, 3-29 Cal. Out of high school, he was the #28 overall recruit in his class. It's not like I'm the only one who thinks he has potential.

If Beard coached Askew for four years, I think he would have turned out to be a tremendous player. He was averaging 15+ PPG for Cal last year before he got hurt.

If you add up the percentages, it comes out to 5.3 wins, 6.7 losses.

I think Terry is settling into his lineup. Man, if only Weaver had played 25 minutes against UCF instead of 4, I have no doubt we would have won. Weaver is great when another team is making a run because he can match their energy. Horton... can't. I have to think that was because Horton was playing against his previous team. I'm sure that isn't lost on the players and maybe they are playing harder now because of it. Regardless, I think at this point we have a clear "best" five. I don't care who starts, but we have to give these guys the most minutes: Abmas, Hunter, Weaver, Mitchell, Disu. They should all be getting 32-35 minutes a game. Horton and Brock can split the remaining 15-20 minutes at the 1-3 spots. Shedrick and Onyema can split the 10-15 minutes available at the 4-5. Here are the minutes against Baylor and OU respectively Abmas - 39, 36 Hunter - 34, 28 Weaver - 19, 28 Mitchell - 35, 34 Disu - 24, 34 Horton - 20, 22 Brock - 10, 11 Shedrick - 16, 4 Chris Johnson - 4, 2 Onyema - 0, 1 (a very important minute tonight IMO) I think that is about right. Disu is going to get mid 30s if he can stay out of foul trouble. Tonight was the first game he had fewer than 4 fouls since his minutes restriction was lifted. Teams are clearly going at him. He CANNOT foul so much if we are going to have any chance.

It is amazing that people are comparing Brock to Weaver. The two couldn't be farther apart as players. Brock is a YMCA goon type player who puts an elbow on you constantly. He sets hard picks, and spots up for wide open 3s (because people forget about him). He is a smart player and keeps the ball moving. On defense he is active, but mainly by doing dirty work around the rim. He is fast or athletic really at all. Like... at all. Weaver is a live freaking wire. He has to be in the top-3 of most athletic guards I have seen at Texas. Up there with Kerwin Roach. He plays lock down defense on the perimeter with great footwork and fundamentals. On offense, he is constantly in attack mode and wants to either dunk on you, get a layup, or get to the line. He passes up all but the most wide open 3s. I don't see Weaver as a "glue guy" at all. He is oozes untapped potential. And I don't worry that he is out of control. He actually doesn't turn the ball over much. It just seems like it.

From last year: First Four 37. Nevada 49. Mississippi State 67. Pittsburgh Missed the cut: 38. North Texas 40. Rutgers 43. Oklahoma State 44. Liberty 46. North Carolina 50. USC 52. Ohio State 54. New Mexico 60. Clemson 61. Michigan 62. Florida 63. Texas Tech 64. Yale 65. Sam Houston State 68. Oklahoma If you are a team like Texas, you are going to get in if you are in the top-40. If you are in the 40-60 range you have a 30% chance. UNC didn't get in at 46. If you are 60+, you aren't gonna make it in. Zero chance.

I've never heard anyone claim that Terry was the choice all the way. In fact, I posted a poll asking what Terry needed to do to earn the job (I believe after we won the Big-12 Tourney), and almost nobody felt he had already earned it. Most of the fans felt he had to make a Sweet 16 at a minimum, and a good number felt he didn't deserve it even with a Final Four. Few is one of the few (pun intended) coaches who would have been worth the blowback from not hiring Terry. The outrage would have passed like a fart in the wind with that hire. And then Terry would have been hired by someone like Tulsa. CDC is a legit moron if he passed on that opportunity. I know he isn't a moron, so it makes me question the validity of the claim. It sounds more like Few was angling for a raise.

Nobody wants anyone shooting 15 ft jump shots. That shot is on the endangered list. He needs to develop a 3-point shot if he ever wants to play in the NBA.

The Big 12 is still very much up for grabs.

I'm of the opinion that we should make horns down our own. Have players start flying the horns up, horns down, horns sideways, horns backwards McConaughey style, aggressive horns pointing at you, whatever. If we get a first down, get up flashing the horns down in their face. If we dunk on your head, give them the horns down when they are laying on the ground. Force refs to start penalizing US for doing it. JMHO.

I don't have a ton of confidence we will make the tournament, but I don't think there are 68 teams better than us either. Both can be true. And I'm not sure why any Texas fan would bet $1,000 against their team.

Yeah, PJ is very different than Mitchell. PJ had an insane low post game for a player of any size, much less one who is 6'5. (But his freakish long arms let him play more like a much taller player). I'm was really just posting to show that Mitchell is on a good trajectory. PJ was a LOT better player as a junior than he was as a sophomore.

The coaching staff has done a good job with Mitchell. He is up from 40% FT to 61% FT, and in the last 5 games he is averaging 70%. If he stayed for four years in college, he could turn into a tremendous player. His defense is great and he has averaged 2 stocks and only 2 fouls. He doesn't really turn the ball over. He finishes. It is surprising, but he is averaging more rebounds and a better shooting percentage than PJ Tucker at the same age. Plus more stocks, fewer turnovers and fewer fouls. And PJ Tucker is STILL in the NBA. Mitchell has a lot more to work with athletically than Tucker. With good coaching and effort, he will make an NBA roster and likely stay a while.

We aren't great, but there aren't 64 teams with a better resume than us at this point. Massey has us at #29, which seems pretty fair. I appreciate you have to be better than top-64 to make the tourney given all the auto-bids, but its not like we are ranked 70th. I would say at this point we are on the bubble. Our good wins are over: #9 Baylor, #51 at Cincinnati, #78 LSU. Our losses are to: #2 UConn, #11 at Marquette, #16 Tech, #74 UCF and #102 at West Virginia. The UCF and WV losses hurt no doubt. Let's compare to another bubble team, Miami... who is fresh off beating us and making it to the Final Four. Miami's good wins: #26 K-State, #27 Clemson, #65 at Virginia Tech, #71 Georgia, #74 UCF Miami's losses: #12 at Kentucky, #44 at Syracuse,#45 Colorado, #52 at Wake Forest, #80 Florida State, #171 Louisville Miami doesn't really have a signature win, though they did beat UCF early in the season. Their losses are much worse than ours. All but Kentucky are out of the top-25, and the Louisville loss is horrid. Let's compare to another bubble team, Michigan State... MSU's good wins: #9 Baylor, #62 Indiana St, #68 Butler, #72 Rutgers MSU's losses: #4 Arizona, #10 Wisconsin, #17 at Illinois, #20 Duke, #49 at Northwestern, #58 at Nebraska, #75 James Madison I would call our wins pretty much a wash. We both beat Baylor, and our win at Cincinnati is better than anything else they have done. Our losses are similar, but they have two more losses than us. Anyway, you can do the same analysis with the other schools who are in this range and we stack up well. The problem is that we play about a billion more teams in the top 20 and people project that we will lose most of them.

If someone would have put a gun to my head before we hired RT and asked me to predict whether he would be successful, I would have probably said "No, but he will be more successful than he was at UTEP and Fresno, mainly because of our resources, but we could do better". That said, I thought there was a reasonable chance that he could adopt a Mack Brown type of head coaching style and be a wizard on the recruiting trail and in the portal... and we could hire some amazing assistants to help with the day to day player development. I thought there was a pretty good chance he could have us in the tourney every year, with periodic runs to the Sweet 16 and Elite 8. And I thought there was an outside chance, maybe 20%, that he could have us as a regular top-10 team. After going through Shaka and Herman, both really good hires at the time, I realized that there are no certainties in coaching. And that success at one level doesn't mean you will be great at Texas. I'm not sure I would put any coach at more than 50% likelihood that they would achieve huge success here in hoops. (Note: Chris Beard is the exception. I was 100% sure that he would crush it here. And I felt that way long before we hired him). So ultimately, I felt like RT deserved a shot. I didn't feel like it was a HUGE longshot, but I definitely didn't feel like it was a slam dunk. In my view, the job he did to right the ship last year was astounding. I attribute a huge part of our run to RT - and I think our players did too. The players and ex-players were steadfast in supporting RT for the job, and that means something to me. I also think loyalty is important, and the universe has a way of rewarding it. I still think the odds are low that he rights the ship. If we miss the tourney this year or next, I fully support showing him the door. We have too many resources to ever miss the tourney. And I don't care what we lose from year to year. The portal should have us in the top-64 teams every year. I don't think there were many people last year who were convinced that RT was the next coming of John Wooden. I think most felt like he earned a shot by giving us an Elite Eight... and winning a Big 12 (Tourney) title. But I think almost everyone realized that it was a risk.