The Texas Longhorns evened up their SEC record at 5-5 with a win over South Carolina but their slow starts are still a problem area that Sean Miller must fix.
The 2025-26 Texas men's basketball team will never make it look easy.
Most every game is a scrap, opponent's record be damned.
And so it went Tuesday against South Carolina at sleepy Moody Center.
The Longhorns are smart enough to realize they can’t look past anybody, yet they were locked in the middle of a cockfight at crunch time against a team with nothing to lose. SC, now 2-8 in SEC play, isn’t a good team but a visitor from another planet would not have been able to pick which team was favored by 13 points at certain points.
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The 84-75 win had to happen at this point in the season lest the Horns were about to start wondering if they would accept the predictable NIT invitation in a couple of months.
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As it turns out, they shook off a comatose start in front of a late-arriving crowd for the early tipoff — the student section at Moody was noticeably thin — survived 35 points from South Carolina guard Meechie Johnson and blistered the Gamecocks with 49 second-half points to win a game much closer than the final score indicated.
And all of a sudden, the Horns, after an 0-2 start in conference play, are firmly in the NCAA Tournament mix. They’re 13-9 overall and 5-5 in the league which puts them only one win from matching last season’s conference total, though it’s obvious the SEC isn’t as strong as the 2025 group that sent 14 teams to the NCAAs.
With beatable Ole Miss coming to town Saturday and Chris Beard coming off an 84-66 beatdown courtesy of fellow former Longhorn coach Rick Barnes’ Tennessee team, there is a chance to stack a third straight win.
Longhorns woke up just in time
The Horns avoided a fate similar to what happened to the football team after it lost to a bad Florida team, effectively crippling its chances to make the College Football Playoff. In basketball’s case, they figured it out thanks to a couple of second-half 3-pointers from Cam Heide, who has emerged as a needed source of offense of late; 15 second-half points from veteran guard Tramon Mark and another 20 from All-SEC candidate Dailyn Swain.
With football coach Steve Sarkisian and baseball coach Jim Schlossnagle seated together courtside, the Horns pulled it together in front of 10,286 who rose to their feet, some of them for the first time all evening.
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One question can apply to both the fans and the team they were watching. Where was the energy?
We understand that a 6 p.m. start and Austin traffic aren’t made for one another but the fans who were there for the tip didn’t bring a whole lot of energy to a team that has a recent history of slow starts. The Horns missed seven of their first eight shots and didn’t reach double digits until the 11-minute, 14-second mark of the first half.
“The message is to keep being aggressive,” Heide said. “You’ve got to go in there and set the tone. If we do that, it’s really going to help.”
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And maybe, just maybe, the crowd will help too.
At one point of the second half with the game still in the balance, coach Sean Miller raised his arms to the fans, asking them to give his team some energy. If we’re being honest, the crowd was as lethargic as the guys playing even if the result turned out in Texas’ favor.
“The one thing about the crowd is you have to give them something to cheer about,” Miller said. “It’s not one-sided. They're coming here. They're sacrificing. They're coming to watch Texas. They want us to win. They want to see a great game. And you’ve got to be locked in.”
Jordan Pope, Matas Vokietaitis have to be better
Texas players, coming off a big win at Oklahoma, weren't locked in for large parts of the game, particularly point guard Jordan Pope who suffered through a 26-minute nightmare.
One of the most experienced guards in the college game missed five of his six field goal attempts and finished with no assists. He went without a field goal for the first 34-plus minutes. When asked if he would consider moving Pope to the wing, Miller said “I think we’ve got him at the right spot. He told me he was a point guard.”
It’s an understatement to say Texas plays to the competition because the Horns are good enough to give a good team like Auburn a tussle and shaky enough to be locked in a 50-50 wrestling match with the No. 15 team in the 16-team SEC.
They’re never going to be a shutdown defense as evidenced by the No. 96 defensive ranking per kenpom.com will attest. More important was a move up to No. 33 in Ken's NCAA NET ratings, seventh among SEC teams.
Seven-foot sophomore post Matas Vokietaitis is going through some growing pains on both ends. He continues to commit careless fouls on defense and continues to get stripped by smaller players because he brings the ball down in traffic despite being only three feet from the bucket. He is second on the team with 53 turnovers, a huge number for the position. Worse yet, he missed more point-blank looks than his coaches care to count.
Looking ahead, the Horns are in play to make a realistic run at the Big Dance but they can’t afford to give away winnable games. Ole Miss, at 11-11 overall and 3-6 in the SEC, represents a nice chance to move over .500 after 11 games for the first time since Rodney Terry took over the 2023 team after Beard’s firing. Texas started 8-3 and advanced to the Elite Eight with a win over Miller’s Xavier team that season.
Lots has changed since then and if you ask Miller, more change is needed — particularly on defense.
If anything, they’re in a good place considering where they started.
Category: General Sports
