Texas Tech basketball: 5 turning points in the 2018-19 season

Beating Texas in Austin began the trend of making history

This year’s team accomplished a ton of program firsts (Big 12 title, Final Four, National Title game appearance) and while their 68-62 win in Austin was not a program first, it did help set the tone for the season by showing that this version of Red Raider basketball was not going to be defined by what Red Raider basketball had not previously been able to accomplish.

Having lost 22-consecutive games at UT, only two players on the roster (Norense Odiase and Brandone Francis) were alive when Darvin Ham and Tony Battie beat the Horns in Austin back in 1996.  But thanks to 22 points from Matt Mooney (born eleven months after Tech’s 1996 win at UT), Tech was able to hold off the Horns and move to 4-0 on the season.

This was a huge moment for Mooney because it was his true coming out party as a Red Raider.  Though he had previously led the team in scoring and had nice games, this was the first time that he single-handedly took over a game and carried his team.  And almost three months later his 22-point showing in the Final Four against Michigan State was a virtual carbon copy of his performance in Austin.

It was at this point that many began to take the Red Raiders seriously as Big 12 contenders.  Having won three games against West Virginia, Kansas State and Oklahoma to begin league play was nice but coming out of Austin with a win always creates tremendous buzz, regardless of how mediocre that season’s version of the Horns may be.

But more importantly, it showed that this year’s team was not concerned with the perceived impossibilities that most placed on the program. To take the program to a higher level, this year’s team was going to have to accomplish feats never seen before in Lubbock.

Breaking the losing streak in Austin was not technically a first for a Red Raider team but it was a first in the modern era of the program.  It takes tremendous mental toughness to make history or break a decades-long losing streak and when Tech knocked off the Horns in Austin with just seven healthy rotation players (losing Deshawn Corprew four minutes into the game with a calf strain), this year’s Red Raiders took a huge step towards developing the mental toughness that would carry them to where no team in program history had been.