I think this is the first point of the game, not the rebound put back. Still a good one.

I told the guys [on Monday], the guys that are going to defend the best these two days in practice are going to get a chance to play. I thought we had nine guys that defended well in practice and I wanted to get them in.

--Mark Turgeon

14 guys played, so who worked the hardest in practice?

The following graph is the difference between the each player's average playing time, and the playing time they saw against Tech. So Josh Carter averages 27.9 minutes a game but he only played 18 minutes on Wed, so the difference is -9.9.

Seven guys saw more than average playing time (to be expected in a blow out), but three had significant increases: Holmes, Lewis, and Beau. If you follow A&M, you were not that surprised to see Holmes and Beau in the game; they had seen action in over twenty games. But Lewis is a different story. Before Wednesday's game, he had only played 61 seconds of Big 12 basketball (the final 1:01 of the K-State debacle), and the only ink he has had before last night was his his waffling after BG left.

Given all of that I would say Lewis worked the hardest.

ESPN picked up Bobby Knight for tourney coverage. This should be great.

Texas A&M 98, Texas Tech 54

Night and day. At the end of the first half, the announcers pointed out that our point total in that half was greater than our average point total in the previous three games. Wow. That is both really bad and really good.

So what else changed?

The following graph shows the difference between our performance in the Tech game and our average performance in the OSU, Texas, and NU games. For example, in the OSU, tu, and NU games games we scored 54, 50, and 59, which is an average of 54.3, and we put up 98 against Tech; so the difference is 43.6 points. I also charted the difference in our opponent's performance.

Wow. I already checked, the rebound/dunk by DJ is not on youtube... yet.

Nebraska 65, Texas A&M 59

Going into this game I felt out season was slipping away, so starting off down 17 - 9 didn't give me the warm fuzzies. We battled back and took the lead with 4:35 let, but it ended like it started with the bad guys going on a 15 - 9 run.

WFT? Where is the team that won the preseason NIT and whipped the Longhorns? Don't ask Turge, he "[doesn't] know what happened to the guys that [he] was coaching when we left Missouri." He has tried to change things, but the players still have to play.

Take the ball screen defense. Turge knows NU likes to roll to the basket after setting a ball screen in hopes of getting an easy layup, so he had our guys squeezed the screen. "By squeezing, [you] can't roll the basket", yet they still manged to get 5 layups off the screen and roll. 10 easy points against a defense whose sole purpose is to prevent that play. "We are guarding it the right way, guys are just not executing."

We have been limited on offense this year. Our point guards can't get us into our sets. We have 234987 big guys, but no one can get them the ball, if they do get the ball they are double teams and can't pass out of it. For the most part teams just have to guard Josh. Fortunately we are usually able to compensate with good defense, but with that gone we can't beat a second tier Big 12 team at home.

So now what? We have been here before. Last time we bounced back and won 5 straight. Turge will "know Monday whether we are out of it or not." The rest of us will have to wait until Wednesday.

Oh ya. DRow played great. 5-7 from the field, 13 points. I guess the nickname worked.

Congrats to Gary Blair for his 500th win. Here's to 500 more!

Loose 3 and it is the end of the world; win 5 and you're back in business; but what about now? We are on the bad end of a two game streak and the regular season ends in a few weeks, so where are we?

Joe Lunardi has us as a 6 seed, but we can still blow it. Our last five games are Nebraska and Tech at home, at Oklahoma, at Baylor, and the finale with the Jayhawks at Reed. If we go 3-2 we dance. A 2-3 and finish would put us at 8-8 in the Big 12, and would requite a strong conference tournament performance to be a factor in anyone's bracket (yes, no one does a NIT bracket).

The question I ask is which 3 can we get?

Nebraska? They just beat K-State using a combo of box-and-one and 2-3 zone defense that made a "national player of the year candidate a non-factor." If they can shut down Beasley we should not expect Carter to get a lot of open shots.

Tech? When was the last time we beat these guys at anything?

Oklahoma? We eeked one out in College Station by making all of their players foul out. I don't think Jeff Capel will keep his starting PG in with four fouls that early in the 2nd half again.

Baylor? If you think we were in a free fall, the Bear have lost 6 of 7 since beating us in the marathon game. But those losses were to teams like KU, Texas, and OU; not exactly cup cakes.

Kansas? We cannot play against pressure defense. KU plays very good defense. KU is very good.

If we play like we did against Texas in College Station, we can win any of these games. If we play like we did in Austin NIT here we come.

1) We need a point guard who can handle pressure defense.

2) We can really leave open some three point shooters

Rickie Barnes thinks that A.J. Abrams's's's ball pressure has been the "biggest difference" in his team's post-Aggie-beat-down performance. Something over there has improved. Since we hung 80 on them while shotting 56% from the field on them, they have kept teams to an average of 39% from the field.

But I am not worried about Abrams, even if his first name ends in J.

I am worried about Dexter Pittman.
Don't be fooled by his 1.8 rebounds per game and 3 points per game. Pittman is dangerous. He is a tactician, a student of the game, and has the inside knowledge of our team to bring us down. Pittman recently commented to we "got so many big men in the rotation, and I know at least every one of them." If he, at least, knows every one, can you imagine what he knows at most? I can't, and that is what makes him so dangerous.