Texas Tech basketball: What needs to change in rematch with WVU

Tonight, the Texas Tech basketball team has its rematch with West Virginia so let’s go inside the first matchup to see what needs to change for the Red Raiders to come out on top.

Texas Tech let one get away in Morgantown last month.  There’s no other way to put it.

After holding what was a 12-point second-half lead, the Red Raiders collapsed in an 88-87 loss that saw WVU score the winning bucket with just seconds remaining on the clock.  It was one of the strangest and most frustrating Texas Tech basketball games in recent memory.

What made that night so odd was the fact that Tech did almost everything right and yet, it wasn’t good enough.

First of all, the Red Raiders got a whopping 30 points from their star, Mac McClung.  Anytime your best player goes off like that, you should expect to win.

Second, Tech committed a season-low two turnovers.  That’s unheard of when facing West Virginia in their own building where the Mountaineers are usually bully opponents into mistake after mistake.

On the boards, Tech lost the rebounding battle by just one.  However, on the offensive glass, the Red Raiders held an 11-5 edge.

What’s more, the Red Raiders were excellent (by their standards) from 3-point range.  Hitting 9-21 attempts, they shot 42.9% as a team, which far exceeds their season average of 34.2%.

Over and over, the box score reads like a game that the Red Raiders would have won.  They had a 25-0 lead in points off of turnovers.  They outscored WVU in the paint 44-28.  They held a 32-21 edge in bench scoring.

Thus, some metrics have suggested that Tech should have won that game going away.  But they didn’t.

"“Now it comes down to the team that executes the ball the best,” Chris Beard said in his postgame press conference. “We didn’t execute on defense down the stretch. You have to find a way to win the game when you score almost 90 points on the road.”"

But since that shocking setback, we could argue that Tech has taken the lessons learned from their collapse and used them to fuel a nice run.  The Red Raiders are 3-0 since that night in Appalachia, and they have vaulted all the way up to No. 7 in the latest polls.

While none of their three wins during the last two weeks have been of the graceful variety, they have been fueled by grit, determination, a never-say-die attitude, and defense and that’s likely what type of effort it will take to hand the Mountaineers a loss this evening in Lubbock.

So let’s look back at what Tech did wrong in their last game with Bob Huggins’ team and try to figure out how they can change those errors in order to get a crucial win this evening.  Here’s what needs to change from the last meeting with West Virginia.