Texas Tech basketball All-Decade Team: The shooting guards

Second team: Matt Mooney

The second-team all-decade shooting guard is Matt Mooney who teamed with Moretti to help form the backcourt tandem on Tech’s national runner-up 2019 team.  He scored 11.2 points per game, just one-tenth less than Moretti but is relegated to second-team honors because he played just one season as a Red Raider.

Of course, it was a fantastic season for the grad transfer from South Dakota.  Mooney arrived as a player known primarily as a scorer as he had averaged 18.5 p.p.g. in the previous two seasons.

But at Tech, he wasn’t asked to be the team’s top scoring option.  Rather, he had to be a part point guard and part shooting guard.

He and Culver were the team’s primary ball-handlers and he was also asked to be Tech’s top on-ball defender.  Not known previously as a lock-down defender, his long reach enabled him to become a fantastic stopper and he averaged 1.8 steals per game.

During his one year as a Red Raider, he scored in double digits 24 times.  That included 22 points against both Texas in Austin and Michigan State in the Final Four.

His game against the Spartans was his defining moment while representing the Double-T.  Hitting 8-16 shots and 4-8 from behind the arc, he accounted for over a third of Tech’s offense.  Draining a pair of deep 3s when the game was in the balance, Mooney carried his team on a night when Culver was awful from the field (3-12).

Mooney is also going to be one of the pioneers of the grad transfer movement at Tech.  Coming to Lubbock as a strong scorer from a low-major program, he turned into one of the best players in the Big 12 in his one year under Beard.  Tech fans wish they would have had more than just 38 games to cheer for Matt Mooney but there’s no denying that his one season in the program was a special as anyone could have ever imagined.