Texas Tech basketball: Baylor game preview and broadcast info
Tonight, the Texas Tech basketball team will host Baylor in a top-25 showdown that will set the early tone for the Big 12 season.
Chris Beard and the Texas Tech basketball team can take what has been a bad day in Waco on Tuesday and make it an awful one by compounding the Baylor athletic department program’s woes. That’s because Tuesday morning, the Baylor football program lost head coach Matt Rhule to the Carolina Panthers of the NFL.
After leading Baylor to an 11-3 record just two years after going 1-11, Rhule became a hot commodity for NFL teams. Despite being an NFL assistant for only one year (2012), Rhule was considered a likely NFL head coach as early as last year when he led Baylor to just a 7-6 record.
Now, Tech can add to Baylor’s miseries by putting an end to the Bears’ 10-game winning streak tonight inside the U.S.A. But doing that will be tough.
Baylor is 34-38 in Big 12 road games since 2012, 2nd-best in the league behind only Kansas (45-28). But of course, Tech is one of the best home teams in the nation as the Red Raiders are riding a 15-game winning streak in Lubbock. Keep in mind that this will be Baylor’s first game of the year on an opponent’s home court.
Also, pay attention to how the score stands at halftime. That’s because Baylor is extremely good at closing out games they have led after 20 minutes of play.
Baylor is 41-4 in its last 45 games when leading at the half, including 15-3 last season and 15-0 in 2017-18. What’s more, Baylor has won 89% of its games (156-20) when leading at the half since 2011-12.
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The glass will also be worth keeping an eye on. The Bears are among the nation’s top rebounding teams, especially on the offensive end of the floor.
They currently rank 7th nationally in offensive rebounding percentage (37.3) and have ranked top-10 nationally in offensive rebounding percentage in every season since 2013-14, including five times ranked in the nation’s top-4.
One has to think that both teams will be rather desperate for a win tonight given that both face tough road tests on Saturday. Tech will head to No. 17 West Virginia this weekend while Baylor has to travel to No. 3 Kansas.
Such is life in the Big 12. And this is going to be one of the games that loom large in the conference title race.
If Tech is going to keep pace, it has to hold serve at home against the league contenders. Hopefully, we see a repeat of last year’s meeting with the Bears in Waco.
Facing a Baylor team that had been the surprise of the Big 12 to that point but which was also missing four key players, Tech blew the doors off Scott Drew’s team 86-61 in a game that is remembered most for the last-second alley-oop dunk by Avery Benson that angered Beard to the point that he made his walk-on redshirt freshman apologize to the Baylor head coach following the game.
It seems unlikely that either of these teams will have the end of their bench on the floor tonight though. This is going to be a rock fight that will come down to the final minutes. But if Tech can play at the level it did on Saturday when it took down Oklahoma State by 35 points, it’s hard to imagine any team coming out of the hornets’ nest that is the U.S.A. with a win.