Currently ranked #5 and is playing #19 Michigan St. at the Toyota Center. Sadly the crowd isn't that much worse than the crowd at Rockets games. It's 21-18 Texas with 7 minutes left. Despite losing Augustin, they've been able to win games (except a 1 point loss to Notre Dame) due to their outstanding, much improved defense. Their offense though has taken a huge hit with DJ leaving. We've tried Abrams and Mason at the point with freshman Dogus Balbay playing some backup. AJ proved that he's anything but a PG, so the duties have fallen to Mason and he's done well. Still, we've lost a major scoring guard, ball handler, and playmaker in DJ, and we haven't recovered from it yet. A few players have improved from last year, namely Pittman, Johnson, and Chapman. Varez Ward is really coming on and could be the next Mason - solid defensive player. However James has had some mediocre games, and Connor Atchley has completely disappeared on the offensive end. He's already airballed 2 open jumpshots today. Abrams has been fantastic since the Notre Dame game where he jacked up 27 shots.
Ugh... pretty bad loss to a great team. I know MSU is ranked #19, but they had all their guys back today including Goran Suton, and he killed us today. Once again, our offense totally tanked, especially late in the game. We only had 2 field goals made in the last 7 minutes. Our last 2 shot attempts were Justin Mason threes... terrible. We desperately need another outside shooter. Johnson and James were fantastic, but we didn't feed them the ball enough. MSU was determined to stop A.J. Abrams, and yet we continued to run plays for him while Johnson and James was pretty much unstoppable. Barnes has to take some criticism for this. And of course using timeouts at the end where we didn't have a TO at the last possession was bad. But at least this isn't college football and the BCS. Barnes has once again done an excellent job at non-conference scheduling, already with games against Notre Dame, UCLA, and Michigan State. We still have Wisconsin to go. It's important to play these games to see where we're at. It definitely worked last year, as we reached the Elite Eight.
Not having a true PG down the stretch of close games is proving to be troublesome. I wasn't too excited about this team going into the season but they're proving me wrong with a little bumps along the way.
Pittman has been starting recently. Connor did not start in the MSU game and rightfully so. I think Chapman was starting instead. Connor comes right off the bench and air balls a three and a midrange jumper. I have no idea what the hell happened to him. You can't just say it was because Augustin left either. Whatever draft stock he had has completely disappeared. At this point I'll be surprised if he gets drafted at all. Austin Toros bound for sure.
Polls are out. Texas is #8 in the Coaches poll and #9 in the AP poll. Weird disparity going on with Michigan State and Texas A&M. I love that we've already played 4 teams that are ranked in the top 20. Thank you, Rick Barnes. Up next is Wisconsin who's ranked in the 30's.
