Texas Tech basketball: 3 reasons Red Raiders lost to Kansas

Tech didn’t make Kansas pay for turnovers

This game was impressive in the sense that the Red Raiders and Jayhawks combined to turn the ball over just 19 times.  That was three fewer than Tech committed on its own Wednesday night against West Virginia.

But while the Red Raiders did force KU to turn the ball over ten times, they weren’t able to turn those extra opportunities into points.  That proved to be costly.

For the game, Kansas had a 13-9 edge in points off turnovers.  That’s a four-point margin in a game that they won by three points.

To put it statistically, KU averaged 1.4 points per Red Raider turnover while Tech got just 0.9 points off of Jayhawk turnovers.  That is not how to pull an upset on the road.

A perfect example of these struggles came when Avery Benson came up with a steal at the 3:32 mark of the first half with Tech trailing 35-28.  On the fast break, Kyler Edwards ended up with a wide-open 3-point opportunity from the corner but he could not connect.  On the ensuing Kansas possession, Isaiah Moss did hit his own 3-point look from nearly the same spot on the court in what was a six-point swing in the game.

On another possession, Edwards and Jahmi’us Ramsey had a two-on-one runout but couldn’t convert as Ramsey’s attempt to finish the alley-oop lob was unsuccessful.  Those are the types of plays that teams simply have to turn into points if they want to win at Allen Fieldhouse.  Unfortunately, Tech didn’t make KU pay for enough of their mistakes to score the huge victory on Saturday.