The Horns play a third game at the Moody Center against an SEC opponent ranked second or higher.
In the midst of a two-game losing streak, the Texas Longhorns welcome the Alabama Crimson Tide to the Moody Center on Tuesday looking to significantly boost the team’s NCAA Tournament resume with an upset.
In the latest Bracketology by Joe Lunardi, Texas is one of the last four byes, a group made up exclusively of SEC teams. With NCAA Tournament odds of 80.6 percent, the Longhorns are firmly on the bubble with some level of fortune that losses to the 14th-place Razorbacks and the ninth-place Commodores haven’t had a more significant impact on those projections.
Injuries have had an impact on the season for Texas, beginning in preseason practice and extending into conference play.
Junior guard Chendall Weaver remains out indefinitely and without a timetable for a return. On Monday, Texas head coach Rodney Terry suggested that the team would declare him out for the season if the UT Arlington transfer was eligible for a medical redshirt.
“We don’t talk a lot about missing him, but we do miss him a great deal, especially at winning time,” Terry said. “But he’s a difference maker for you because he makes a lot of winning plays and does a lot of things that don’t show up in the in the stat sheet, but he gives you a lot of winning opportunities on offense and defense.”
Other players are dealing with less significant injuries. Senior wing Tramon Mark missed the loss to Vanderbilt with a shoulder injury, but is listed as probable against Alabama. Also listed as probable are senior forward Arthur Kaluma, who missed the comeback win against Texas A&M with a knee injury, and sophomore wing Devon Pryor, who suffered a calf strain in the loss to Arkansas last week. Senior forward Kadin Shedrick isn’t listed on the injury report, but played through a lower back injury sustained against the Razorbacks.
It’s a confluence of some bad injury luck for the Horns and also a natural outcome from playing in such a physical conference that presents a conundrum for Terry and his staff — Texas needs to have some contact in practice to carry over that mentality into games, but have to balance that with the need to maintain the team’s health.
“As much as we want to be physical in between games, it’s really hard for us to be as physical as we want to be sometimes in practices because of the availability of our guys and kind of just when we are from a physical standpoint. This time of year, you can’t go in and just beat your guys up — you need to have them available. But you also need to have competitive practices as well, even with the quick turnaround and being nicked up a little bit,” Terry said.
So the Longhorns did hold a physical practice on Monday — “bone on bone,” as he likes to call it — playing the ones against the twos instead of working against the scout team.
“In this league, every nigh, it’s a physical battle coming to you and you have to be willing to bring the contact to your opponent, because the opponents are going to bring the contact to you,” Terry said.
In the loss to Vanderbilt, Texas struggled to block out effectively, allowing 17 offensive rebounds that the Commodores turned into 25 second-chance points, finishing the eight-point victory plus-14 in that category.
Alabama presents a similar challenge, ranking No. 20 nationally in offensive rebounding percentage at 36.7. But the more dangerous aspect of the second-ranked offense in adjusted efficiency is its pace — the Crimson Tide are the highest-scoring team in the country at 90 points per game because they rank first in adjusted offensive efficiency.
It’s not necessarily that Alabama is the nation’s best fast-break team, as it ranks just outside the top 25 in fast break points per game at over 14 points per contest, it’s how frequently they can get quality looks with their initial actions. It’s also an aggressive team that scores with the clock stopped by ranking 19th in free-throw rate, led by guard Mark Sears and forward Grant Nelson. Sears has taken 154 free throws and Nelson has attempted 103 with free-throw rates of over 50 percent.
“Transition defense is going to be really big for us. We’ll have to try to get back, defense set, because they really score early in the possession — they’re getting a shot up pretty quick whether it’s for a layup or for a scoring opportunity for three. They’re by far the fastest team we’ve played,” Terry said.
An Ohio transfer, Sears is averaging 17.8 points per game and leads the team in assists.
“You talk about Sears as a Final Four guy. He’s a guy that he’s really kind of the head of the snake —he’s the guy that makes everything go you know, I think the leading scorer in our league at 19 points a game, almost 20 points a game,but he’s more than that to their team. He’s a guy that’s a floor general. He makes the right pass, makes the right reads, and in big moments in games, he doesn’t have a problem with taking over and trying to be the closer,” Terry said.
With the Crimson Tide scoring so many points, it’s no surprise to see a balanced offensive attack that features six players averaging double digits, including the secondary ball handler Labaron Philon, a freshman who played with Texas freshman guard Tre Johnson at LINK Academy.
So Tuesday’s contest is yet another SEC game in which the Longhorns have to value every single possession.
“I don’t think I have ever had been a part of a league that’s been as ultra competitive as this league is every night where you literally have to coach every game like it’s an NCAA Tournament game. There are no possessions off in this league — you could have had seasons where in conference play, every possession is not going to cost you the game, but in this league, man, every possession is a big possession and the margin of error that you have in this league is very, very slim,” Terry said.
Alabama has a 61-percent win probability, according to BartTorvik.com, and is a 4.5-point favorite on FanDuel. Tip is at 8 p.m. Central on ESPN.