In what could be the final time the Texas Longhorns ever play a basketball game in Lubbock, Texas, they handed the Texas Tech basketball team as thorough of a beating as the Red Raiders have taken all year. Here are some rapid reactions to the 81-69 UT win.
Pop Isaacs needs to be benched for everyone’s good
Something drastic needs to happen to get Pop Isaacs out of his own head. Perhaps that something would be to bring him off of the bench in the next game.
Sure, the sophomore scored a team-high 17 points on Tuesday but most of that came in the second half when Texas was simply playing with its food after building a 47-23 halftime lead. Still, Isaacs was just 5-18 from the floor, and any time a player takes more shots than he has total points, that’s a problem.
Isaacs is playing the worst basketball of his career and that’s a stretch that is now seven games and counting. At one point on Tuesday, he was 0-10 from the field and many of his misses were comically bad.
You can’t completely bench Isaacs given how thin this team is at guard. But, perhaps taking some of the pressure off of him and bringing him in as a reserve for the first time this year would be best for him and his team. Whatever the solution is to get Isaacs back on track, Grant McCasland had better figure it out and fast.
Washington’s absence felt again
Warren Washington missed his third game out of the last four with a toe injury and it was obvious that the Texas plan all night was to exploit that fact. The Horns knew that the smaller Red Raider forwards would not be able to defend Texas’ big men and that proved to be the case.
Skilled 6-foot-9 forward Dylan Disu scored 21 easy points and grabbed six boards while abusing Robert Jennings and Eemile Yalaho. Meanwhile, 6-foot-10 Kadin Shedrick had 10 points and six rebounds himself.
On the other hand, Jennings, Yalaho, and KyeRon Lindsay managed to combine for seven points and five rebounds. Truly, without Washington, this team has little chance to compete. Frankly, it’s a miracle that Tech found a way to beat TCU last week when Washington was sidelined.
Was the hype too much?
Sometimes, the energy inside an arena can work against the home team. One has to wonder if that was the case in this game.
Students had been camped out for this game since the end of last week and people all over town had been looking forward to one last opportunity to stick it to Texas. It was a capacity crowd and a national television audience on ESPN to boot.
Perhaps all of that caused this Red Raider team to play too tight early on. That can happen at times when the stage gets too big. Surely in the first half, Tech played its worst basketball of the year and McCasland’s team looked nervous, sped-up, and out of sorts. Thus, it is fair to wonder if there was too much hype surrounding this matchup and if that was actually a detriment to the home team.
I honestly don’t know what else to say about this game. It was thorough domination from start to finish by Texas. The Horns were desperate for a Quad 1 road win to try to move off of the NCAA Tournament bubble and they played like the hungrier team.
Tech is in a bad way right now without Washington and now faces two road games, at West Virginia and Oklahoma State before the regular-season finale at home against Baylor. This team had better do some soul-searching before Saturday’s game in Morgantown or things could get rather interesting when it comes to the Red Raiders’ NCAA Tournament hopes.
