Once-mighty Texas has no one to blame but itself for loss
NEW ORLEANS -- You would have never known two former No. 1 teams played Thursday night.
You could have easily guessed the East Regional's top-seeded Kentucky was one of those former No. 1 teams in college basketball. They look the part. They play the part. They talk the part.
Then there's Texas.
No, I'm not kidding. Remember way back this season when the Longhorns began the season 17-0, including wins over NCAA tournament teams like Pittsburgh and Michigan State on the resume?
Those joyous times have been replaced with despair and disappointment as Wake Forest's spark plug of a point guard Ishmael Smith drained a jumper with 1.3 seconds left in overtime to beat Texas 81-80 on Thursday night. The once-mighty Longhorns finished the season losing 10 of their last 17 games.
For Kentucky, it all starts with coach John Calipari and the confidence oozes down to the likes of John Wall, Eric Bledsoe and you can go on and on down to the water boy. So Calipari can get away with saying things like, "[East Tennessee State] hit the buzzsaw" after throttling the No. 16 seed Thursday night.
Texas may have had that swagger earlier this season.
It's gone now. Long gone and Texas coach Rick Barnes is still befuddled is to how exactly did this happen.
The Longhorns peered at each other with scowls of panic and confusion in the second half. They displayed brief signs of the 17-0 team late in the first half as they slipped into the lead temporarily. It, like this season, evaporated before their very eyes.
Texas let Wake Forest drive to the hoop for easy buckets way too many times. The Demon Deacons were the crisper team with Smith running up and down the court like he guzzled a case of Red Bull.
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Wake Forest found the holes throughout Texas' defense. The Demon Deacons also absolutely destroyed the Longhorns on the boards as Wake Forest outrebounded Texas 59-34.
"I don't remember us getting outrebounded ever like this," Barnes said. "I really don't."
And yet, it's still not like Texas mailed it in against Wake Forest despite the huge disparity in rebounding. The players dove for loose balls. They cared. They cared a lot considering how hard they fought to send the game into overtime and sprung to a 76-68 lead midway through overtime.
Then everything that could go wrong did as Wake Forest ended the game on a 13-4 run with Smith's shot being the final chapter in a season of unmet expectations. The most painful aspect came when Texas' Gary Johnson missed two free throws with 10 seconds left in overtime. It allowed Smith to bolt down the court without taking a timeout and put Texas on its heels as the shifty guard drained the game-winner.
"We talked about just getting stops," Smith said. "That's the biggest thing. When you get down eight, usually when you watch overtime games, a team usually gets down by four or more points and they cave in. They start looking at the clock, and the clock starts ticking down. They start feeling sorry for themselves. But what we did was, like coach [Dino Gaudio] said, we've just got to keep getting stops. Keep getting stops. And we did. We came up with the big win."
The 8-9 seed matchup is typically a battle of mediocre, and neither team shielded away from those tags. The problem for Texas is that they were way more than mediocre earlier this season. The Longhorns were kings of the castle.
Barnes was asked if the highs and lows of Thursday night's loss could be the dreaded microcosm of his season, Barnes said, "Pretty close, yeah. Pretty close."
Texas forward Damion James said "no comment" when asked before the tournament whether the team wanted to wipe away the perception of being college basketball's biggest goat. James used the same line when asked after the Wake Forest lost on if he could wrap his head around how the season went south so fast.
"We started off good, you know. Playing as a team playing and moving the ball," Texas guard J'Covan Brown said. "Once we got like later towards the season we stopped doing the little things that made us a good team. Coach was trying to keep that in our mind for us to play as a team. We just got away from it."
So I'll take a stab at it.
Is Texas the biggest flop in college basketball this season?
Tough to say no.
At least Texas won't suffer the embarrassment of facing a legitimate top seed on Saturday. But this year's embarrassment in Austin was self induced.
