Texas Tech basketball: How the Red Raiders were able to beat UT

In Wednesday’s thrilling 79-77 win over the Texas Longhorns in Austin, the Texas Tech basketball team won a game that the stats suggest they shouldn’t have.

How many teams in the nation would have been able to do what the Texas Tech basketball team did Wednesday night in Austin?  How many would have been able to withstand the best punch the No. 4 team in the nation could throw and not be knocked out by halftime?  Not many.

Certainly, Texas Tech won last night’s contest as much on guts and fortitude as on pure basketball skill.  But that’s what Chris Beard means when he refers to his program playing with a street dog mentality.  In fact, after the game, he tweeted out a picture of a pack of hungry street dogs to further reinforce the point that Tech basketball is all about staying hungry and playing with an edge.

Let’s stop and think about how thoroughly dominant Texas was in that first half of play.  Shooting 15-30 from the floor and 8-14 from the 3-point line, the Horns were as on fire as just about any team could be.

What’s more, on the seemingly rare instances when they did miss a shot, they were dominant on the glass.  In that first 20 minutes of play, UT owned a 22-14 advantage in rebounding, a stat inflated by nine offensive boards.

Texas guard Andrew Jones nearly shot his team to an insurmountable lead all by himself in that half.  With 18 points, he nearly essentially his season average in Big 12 play.

Additionally, Matt Coleman added 10 points and Courtney Ramey 9 as the UT backcourt scored 37 points in the first half.  Yet it still wasn’t enough.

The key for Tech was to keep hanging in the fight, keep landing enough body blows to eventually weaken your opponent.  And that’s what Beard’s team did in that first half.

Every time UT put together a run, Tech had enough of an answer to stay in contact with the Horns. And at some point, Shaka Smart’s team had to wonder just what it was going to take to knock the Red Raiders out completely the way the Longhorns did to the Kansas Jayhawks in Lawrence two weeks ago when they destroyed KU 84-59.

But this Texas Tech team proved to be unshakeable, at least on Wednesday night.  And that’s a sign that the 2020-21 version of the program is starting to take on Beard’s mentality.  It’s a sign that this is a team that is starting gel after a month-and-a-half of an adjustment period.

Still, this will always feel like a game that Tech should have lost.  In fact, after the final buzzer sounded and my heartbeat returned to normal last night, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “How in the heck did they pull that off?”.

So to answer that question, let’s go inside the box score and figure it out together.  And we will start by looking at the clamps the Red Raiders put on Texas’ emotional leader.