Texas Tech basketball uses huge second half to overwhelm USC

The Texas Tech basketball team ran past USC 78-63 thanks to a huge second half to earn an important non-conference win Monday night.

Chris Beard’s team played its first game in almost a week Monday night and for the first 20 minutes, it looked like the Red Raiders had forgotten how to play basketball in the last six days. But a nearly flawless second half helped Texas Tech earn a huge 78-63 non-conference win over the USC Trojans in Kansas City.

The Red Raiders hit 16 of 19 field goal attempts in the second half outscoring the Trojans 55-31 in one of the best halves any Chris Beard team has played since he took over the program three seasons ago.

Jarrett Culver and Tariq Owens each led the way with 18 points while Matt Mooney and Davide Moretti both had 17 as four of Tech’s five starters had huge offensive nights. But in the first half, it looked like the Red Raider offense would be lucky to top the 40-point mark.

Tech shot a dreadful 27% from the field (9-33) en route to a 32-23 deficit after 20 minutes. The offense was stagnant against the Trojan man-to-man defense as Beard saw his team continually pass up open looks only to settle for worse shots later in the possession.

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Tech was just 1 of 9 from behind the line in the fist half while USC took control by hitting 6 of 12 from deep and 46% overall. But whatever Chris Beard said at half-time certainly paid off.

After USC took an 11-point lead at 34-23 in the first minute of the second half, Mooney and Culver went to work. Mooney had seven points and Culver added four during a 13-2 run that saw the Red Raiders claim a 37-36 lead.

Though Mooney was not the Red Raiders’ leading scorer, he was their best player in a game that showed why he was such a highly-coveted graduate transfer this summer. After averaging over 18 points per game in each of his past two seasons as South Dakota, Mooney had struggled at times to find his rhythm offensively in the fist three games of the season.

But after scoring just 15 points in his previous two games, the senior hit 6 of 12 shots from the field, including 2 of 2 from three-point range, to help spark what had been a sluggish Texas Tech offense. In addition, he added five rebounds, four assists and four steals in a game that saw him outperform a number of potential NBA prospects on the other bench.

USC true freshman Kevin Porter Jr., a 5-star recruit and the No. 28 player in the 2018 class led the Trojans with 15 points while Bennie Boatwright (himself an NBA prospect last year before he suffered a season-ending knee injury in February) added 15 off the bench.

But it was the work that Tariq Owens and Norense Odiase did on USC’s star big man that was the most surprising. 6-foot-11 Nick Rakocevic entered the game averaging a team-high 17 points and 15 rebounds per game but was held to just nine points and nine rebounds and was frustrated throughout the game picking up both a flagrant and a technical foul in the first half.

It was the first time this year that Rakocevic failed to reach double digits in either points or rebounds as he spent a huge portion of the game on the bench in foul trouble. Meanwhile, his counterpart, Tariq Owens put on a show down the stretch with a number of highlight-reel plays including a dunk off of a lob from Culver that reminded Red Raider fans of the type of alley-oops that we grew accustomed to seeing Zhaire Smith pull off last year.

The win moved the Red Raiders to 4-0 on the season and sets up a meeting with Nebraska Tuesday night at 8:30. But this is an important early-season win that could pay huge dividends in March.

USC is expected to be a contender in the Pac 12 and an NCAA Tournament team so being able to have a win over the Trojans on the resume can only help the Red Raiders when Selection Sunday rolls around. But if the team we see the rest of the season is anything that even resembles the team we saw in the second half on Monday night, Texas Tech basketball fans will have nothing to sweat when the bracket is released this spring.