For those who haven’t seen the headlines by now, one of the best teams in college basketball; the No. 10-ranked Texas Longhorns got absolutely embarrassed on national television in their first true test at home against the No. 16 Oklahoma Sooners. And by embarrassed, I mean the Longhorns were pretty much out of the game in the first half of the first half.
Yes, the game was out of control within the first 10 minutes of the first half, which ultimately became a 70-49 victory for the Sooners.
So what happen to the Longhorns in this blowout loss and is this something we can expect heading into a very tough stretch of conference play?
Well, to put it as simple as possible, the Sooners were scoring at will while the Longhorns couldn’t buy a shot. By the time Texas had seven points, they also had nine turnovers and just about all of those resulted is easy looks for the Sooners.
What was a manageable deficit in the beginning transformed into a nearly insurmountable lead to overcome after Texas completely abandoned their identity in the paint and started hoisting 3-pointers at will, which didn’t fare very well for Rick Barnes’ club.
But overall, the issue that came to fruition last night was the biggest concern that has surrounded the Longhorns up to this season; they struggle to find consistent scoring. Monday night in Austin, Javan Felix was the only Longhorn to crack double digits with 13 points, but it came on 4-of-12 from the field.
Texas is entering a stretch of their schedule where three of their five opponents are ranked and four of the five have an offense that ranks higher in the conference than the Longhorns. The exception to that is No. 12 Kansas, which is a game Texas will very likely lose if they struggle this tremendously to find point production.
It’s crazy to think how after only one game, a team can go from having the title of Big 12 favorites to having so many questions surrounding where their offense will come from. We know Texas has the weapons to score, but at the sight of adversity, they abandoned their system and identity by trying to match threes with the Sooners.
Texas will run into an Oklahoma State team on the road Saturday that features some very talented veterans that know how to score. Forget looking ahead to what is going to be four ranked opponents in their next five games.
If the Longhorns can’t find a handful of guys to go to when things get difficult offensively, Barnes could see his team drop two early conference games, and in the race for the regular season Big 12 titles, just a couple losses will prove to be the difference in who takes it all.
They say offense wins games and defense wins championships, but if Texas even plans on being in that discussion by season’s end, their offense needs to step up in a big way before the losses start to pile up in college basketball’s deepest conference.