Texas Tech basketball: Why this Red Raider team is so inconsistent

This year’s team relies more heavily on freshmen scoring than any other Chris Beard team

We all like to say that by this point in a season, freshmen are no longer freshmen.  But the reality is that every aspect of a player’s first year is a new experience.  Every road game is a trip to a new building, every postseason tournament is eye-opening, every struggle or setback is likely the first time they’ve experienced such difficulties on the court.  Thus, teams that rely as heavily on freshmen as this year’s Red Raiders do are likely to be up and down.

This is the first time in the Chris Beard era that Tech has had a freshman as its leading scorer.  Thus, there are going to be nights like Tuesday when a good coach such as OU’s Lon Kruger can come up with a scheme to frustrate that first-year player.

Whereas Keenan Evans had been around for two years before being asked to carry this program in the first two years of the Beard era, Ramsey is shouldering a similar load while not having the benefit of having been around the Big 12 block.  Even Jarrett Culver had a full year under his belt when being thrust into the lead role a season ago.

What’s more, Tech is asking other freshmen to be a larger part of Ramsey’s supporting cast than previous Red Raider teams asked their freshmen to do in support of that year’s leading scorer.  Thus, fluctuations are bound to occur.

This year, 51.3% of Tech’s scoring is coming from freshmen.  That’s over 36 points per game.  Last year, Tech got just 8.2 points per game from freshmen with Kyler Edwards’ 5.5 being the only significant contributions to the regular rotation.  This year, Ramsey (15.6), Terrence Shannon Jr. (10.1), and Kevin McCullar (5.5) are all essential components of the Red Raiders’ nightly mix.

That trio is being asked to do more for this team than even the 2017-18 freshman class of Culver, Moretti, and Zhaire Smith, which combined for 26 points per game.  The reason that that team seemed to have fewer nights of offensive ineptitude was that Keenan Evans was driving the team as a senior and veterans like Justin Gray, Niem Stevenson, and Norense Odiase all helped bring about stability.

This year, freshmen are playing a larger role than ever before for the Red Raiders and while they are proving to be very good players, the best freshmen class this program has ever seen in fact, they are still going to have periods of ineffectiveness.  Because of that, we are going to have to learn to ride the waves this year as this young roster figures out what it takes to compete on a nightly basis in one of the toughest conferences in the nation.