Texas Tech basketball: What we have learned in first two months of 2019-20

With the Texas Tech basketball season now two months old, let’s take a look at what have learned about Chris Beard’s team.

In some ways, it has felt like just a matter of days since we were at United Supermarkets Arena for the November 5th season-opener against Eastern-Illinois.  In fact, many of us are still forcing ourselves to look up at the 2019 Final Four banner every time we go to a game so that we can remain convinced that last spring’s amazing ride was real.

But on the other hand, it also felt like the non-conference portion of the schedule this year has been much more of a grind.  That’s because of the 3-game losing streak that we endured at the end of November and beginning of December.

That’s not something we are accustomed to seeing.  After all, this program had gone since 2015 without losing more than one game prior to the start of Big 12 play and it had not lost as many as three times prior to the league schedule since 2014.

But in a way, those three losses to Iowa, Creighton, and DePaul were important learning opportunities for this young and rebuilt team.  And the fact that they came without leading scorer Jahmi’us Ramsey in the lineup was even more of a valuable lesson for the Red Raiders.

It may eventually prove beneficial for this team to have gone through some lows prior to Big 12 play so that the shock of losing isn’t experienced for the first time when the games matter most.  Maybe this year’s team has already gotten its multiple-game losing streak out of the way and if that’s the case, it will be because of the resilience developed during the non-conference slide.

The Big 12 is daunting and even the best Red Raider teams ever have had to fight through rough patches during play in what is generally thought to be the best conference in the nation.

In 2018, Tech went through a 4-game losing streak in the final two weeks of February.  Of course, that one was easy to explain because it coincided with point guard Keenan Evans’ toe injury, which forced him to miss the second half the game in which he broke his phalange as well as two more games.  He did try to play against Kansas two games after he was initially hobbled but he was just a shell of his former self.

Last year’s 3-game skid in January was much more difficult to explain.  In losses to Iowa State and at Baylor and at Kansas State, Tech simply quit playing basketball the Chris Beard way.

Tech stopped moving without the ball, rebounding, communicating, or playing with intensity.  It got so bad that starting center Tariq Owens was taken out of the starting lineup for the game in Manhattan after he showed an uncharacteristic lack of effort in Waco.  It is hard to fathom one of last year’s most intense competitors playing less than full-out but that was the case in Beard’s estimation and the result was Owens’ only game of the year off the bench.

The point is that every season, a team is going to face a stretch in which it seems like nothing goes right.  How many of us felt that way just a couple of weeks ago when Tech was riding a 3-game skid into a showdown with No. 1 Louisville?

The key during those times is to continue to do the things that have proven in the past to lead to success and in the victory over the Cardinals in New York, Tech got back to the defensive principles and played with the level intensity that is required of a championship team.  Now, the question remains as to whether they learned that lesson completely given that the two games since toppling the Cards have been less than inspiring.

Only time will tell what Tech learned in their non-conference slide but with Big 12 play only one game away, we are about to find out.  In the meantime, let’s take a look at what we as fans have learned about this year’s Texas Tech basketball team in the first two months of the year.