The Difference Between Good and Great

Before delving into the game itself, I think it’s worth setting the bar for where the UConn Huskies are as a program. Most everyone who reads this blog knows they are the back-to-back defending national champions - only the third program since March Madness expanded to 64 teams in 1985 - and that by their standards they’re having a down year so far, but it’s worth pointing out that their 3-game losing streak was the first time they’d lost multiple games in a row in nearly 700 days. Between their loss to Seton Hall on January 18th, 2023 and their loss to Colorado on November 26, 2024, their combined record was 57-7 and the average KenPom rank of the seven teams who beat them was 23. They spent exactly 0 out of the 678 days in that stretch ranked outside of the top 10 in KenPom (they never even dropped to 9) and were in the top 5 well over half of the time. With apologies to Bill Self & Mark Few, this is currently the preeminent college basketball program in the country, and they’re still perfectly capable of grabbing yet another 1-seed on their way to the Final Four. They’re ‘down’, but they’re not down.

All of that is to say it’s not surprising Texas lost to the Huskies, especially when news came out that they were getting their All-American forward Alex Karaban back from concussion protocol. The Huskies may not have a defensive anchor like Donovan Clingan on the team, but their offense is as intricate & indefensible as ever and they are one of the relatively few teams in the country who can match up athletically with Texas. It was always going to be an uphill climb for the Longhorns, and I suspect when March rolls around the Huskies’ 3-game losing streak will look like the aberration instead of the norm because they are great. We all saw what this Huskies squad is capable of when they dragged Texas to the seventh level of Hell in the first half, cutting the defense to ribbons with offensive sets designed to punish college defenses and defenders who aren’t executing perfectly for all 30 seconds of the shot clock. Try to take a shortcut around an off-ball screen? They’ll pop out for an open three. Get jammed up fighting over a screen? They’ll cut to the basket while you’re stuck in Tarris Reed’s armpit. Make it over the screen? That’s fine; this is only the first action out of four in this set, you’ll screw up eventually. They do this to everybody; UConn’s offense is a Saw movie and you just woke up handcuffed to a radiator.

When UConn is rolling like they were in the first half I don’t know what team can beat them, but this isn’t meant to absolve Rodney Terry and his staff of responsibility, there are things I wish they had tried (or tried more often):

More Pressing

The thing about UConn that’s so deadly is the intricacy of their sets and how they’re designed to flip the defense two or three or four times to pry open uncontested shots; the only way for most teams to hamstring this is to make them take more time getting into their sets. If you can drain an extra 5-7 seconds off the shot clock by defending them in either a 3/4-court or full-court press, they have that much less time to even get to that third or fourth action. Jay Bilas said early in the broadcast that Texas was going to do it a lot, which leads me to believe Bilas watched them work on it in practice leading up to the game, they just…didn’t, for some reason.

I’m not really looking for a trap here - for one, Texas doesn’t really trap a lot, and 2 guys on the ball means UConn is probably passing over the top to somebody who is wide open - I’m looking to compress their timeline. Texas mostly defended well in the first half-court offensive action, if they could have made that the only action in a handful of possessions then maybe the game is tighter going into halftime.

More Cutting

The Huskies were intent on aggressively hedging and forcing any Texas perimeter players with a reasonable three to receive passes as far off the three-point line as possible, keeping the Longhorns from touching the paint in far too many possessions. (The bigs played mostly drop coverage.) It would have been nice to see an adjustment where guys like Tre Johnson & Tramon Mark saw the pursuit and back-cut more often to punish the aggressiveness.

Replace Jordan Pope with Isaiah Taylor

Most of the portal additions for Texas have been positive - Jayson Kent is TBD due to injury - but it doesn’t feel like Pope 100% knows his place in things yet. He hasn’t been outright bad, but he was nearly a member of Club Trillion in the first half against UConn and that simply cannot happen with your starting PG if you’re trying to beat a title contender. This Texas squad is one above-average floor general away from being just about right where it needs to be, and I don’t know if Pope and/or Julian Larry are going to get there this season. Maybe Tramon Mark can take on more in this area to help out, though given his career assist/turnover rate & his defensive issues that might be a bit of a high-wire act.

Schedule Harder Non-Con Games

Maybe if this hadn’t been the second real test of the season, the team would’ve started out better. I imagine Terry/Texas were expecting to match up against Texas Tech in Barclays as a good non-con opponent, but you know an easier way to do that? Schedule a home & home against them. Texas now will learn very little else about themselves until conference play begins because the non-con schedule suuuuuuucks. The first five SEC games are at #24 KenPom A&M, vs #1 Auburn, vs #2 Tennessee, at #42 Oklahoma, at #8 Florida. Don’t you think you’d like to have a couple more measuring sticks before hitting this stretch? Or to put it another way: if you start 0-5 in SEC play because of how front-loaded the schedule is, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to point to a couple of marquee wins in November/December as a way to keep the donors/NIL people from getting too grumpy?

I’m not really that worried about this team, with as bad as the first half went they still had a chance to put the outcome in doubt if Kadin Shedrick stops shooting free throws with his feet. They’re a good squad and they have second-weekend potential if they figure out how to optimize the rotation, but yesterday was a good reminder of the gap between Texas and the program at the top.