Moral victories will get Texas Tech basketball nowhere

For Texas Tech to take the next step towards becoming a legitimate NCAA tournament team, it is going to have to stop settling for moral victories. Saturday’s 69-59 loss to No. 1 Kansas is being referred to as a hard-fought example of how much improvement Tubby Smith’s Red Raiders have made this year but that narrative is gong to get tired in a hurry.

After starting Big 12 conference play with a nice win over the hated Texas Longhorns, Texas Tech has now missed two opportunities in one week to prove to the nation that the time is now for Texas Tech basketball.

What is disappointing is that both games were winnable.

Against the Cyclones, Texas Tech was able to get Iowa State’s star Georges Niang into foul trouble forcing him to miss almost all of the first half. Despite the fact that Niang did not score until the second half, Texas Tech could not capitalize and trailed by 10 at halftime.

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Despite being within three points on numerous occasions in the second half, the Red Raiders never came up with the big play to take control of the game. Instead, it was the Cyclones that made the key plays down the stretch, especially Matt Thomas who hit six 3-pointers in the game.

The script was almost the exact same on Saturday. Texas Tech hosted No. 1 Kansas and played a competitive game that drew praise from the television commentators and national media but ultimately it lost a winnable game.

After knotting the score at 44 with just over 10 minutes to play, Texas Tech could not keep pace with the Jayhawks. Again timely 3-point shots from the opponent doomed the Red Raiders.

Wayne Seldon and Frank Mason III delivered clutch 3-point shots down the stretch and Texas Tech was unable to respond. Plus, while Kansas was using its best offensive weapon, the 3-point shot (KU leads the nation in 3-point shooting at 54%) Texas Tech’s most reliable weapon failed in a big way.

Coming into the game, Tech was a 74% free throw shooting team. It had missed only nine-combined free throw attempts in its first two conference games.

But against Kansas, Texas Tech missed 10 free throws on its way to a miserable 9-19 (47.4%) effort. Any mathematician can see that the number of Texas Tech missed free throws was exactly equal to the margin of victory for the Jayhawks.

Of course it is unlikely that any team will be 100% from the foul line in a game but had Texas Tech hit 74% of its free throws it would have had an extra six points on the board, which would have drastically altered the final two minutes of the game.

Texas Tech fans have reason be proud of the team’s improvement this year but ultimately that improvement must yield results in the win column. Some may say that criticizing the young Red Raiders for losing to two top-15 teams in a week is unfair but the reality is that the road will not get any easier during Big 12 play.

Still to come are two games against the No. 2 Oklahoma Sooners, the No. 17 West Virginia Mountaineers, the Baylor Bears (which won at Iowa State Saturday afternoon) and rematches with the Cyclones and Jayhawks.

Texas Tech has now learned that it is capable of playing with the big boys but until it starts to beat the big boys, not much will have changed. It doesn’t matter if Texas Tech loses 12 conference games (which by the way I do not think it will) by single digit margins. Losses by any deficit are still blemishes on a team’s record; only wins will get the Red Raiders into postseason play.

As former New York Jets head coach Herman Edwards once famously said:

When rebuilding a program as wretched as the Texas Tech basketball program has been over the past eight years, it is reasonable to afford the team patience. However, seeing the team lose two winnable games that would have been signature victories that might have put the team on track for an NCAA tournament bid, it is natural to become slightly frustrated.

Tubby Smith most certainly is not in the business of moral victories. Following the loss at Iowa State, he said as much.

"“A loss is a loss.” Smith told the Lubbock Avalanche Journal. “If we’d handled [the game] the right way, we would have won. It was really disappointing. It was good to come back but we should never have been in that situation. I think we’ve learned from it. We grew and understood that we better play a certain way, the right way, every time and every second or we’re going to get beat.”"

Apparently that lesson was not learned well enough because against Kansas, Texas Tech again did not do the little things necessary to knock off the No. 1 team in the nation. At some point, the Red Raiders must stop settling for moral victories or they will miss out on the NCAA tournament for the ninth consecutive season.

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