There's nothing better for a struggling team than playing arguably the two worst teams in the Big 12 in back-to-back games and that's what the Texas Tech basketball team has had the opportunity to do in the past four days. Tuesday night, the Red Raiders cruised to a 75-58 win at Oklahoma State to give the Red Raiders a two-game winning streak after Saturday's win at West Virginia.
The Red Raiders never trailed in the game and led by as many as 24 points in the first half on the way to a 38-17 halftime lead. In the second half, Tech played with its food a bit but was never challenged by the lifeless Cowboys, a team simply playing out the string on a long and disappointing season.
Grant McCasland's team now sits at 10-7 in Big 12 play and 21-9 overall. Let's take a look at some rapid reactions from the latest Red Raider victory.
Pop Isaacs has his best game in weeks
Scoring a game-high 19 points, Texas Tech sophomore guard Pop Isaacs had his best game since he scored 32 points against BYU on January 20. It was because he was more efficient than he had been since that epic performance in Lubbock against the Cougars.
Tuesday night, Isaacs was 7-11 from the field. Shooting 63.6% from the floor, he had his best shooting night of the season. That included 2-5 shooting from 3-point range. While that type of shooting from deep is not worthy of headlines, his 40% shooting from deep was his best effort from downtown since he was 5-11 against TCU on January 30.
Tech desperately needs Isaacs to work his way out of his weeks-long slump now that the postseason is just one game away. Hopefully, this performance is a sign that he is doing just that.
Darrion Williams remains steady
Over the last nine games, Darrion Williams has scored in double figures each time out. That included 18 points to go along with nine boards against the Cowboys.
Since the February 6th game at Baylor, Williams has averaged 17.3 points per game. He's quickly become this team's best overall player and that trend continued against OSU. The best news is that he's just a sophomore.
Texas Tech clamps down on OSU from deep
For most of the season, Tech has struggled to play defense at the 3-point line. In fact, the Red Raiders are only 9th in the Big 12 in 3-point FG defense.
If OSU had any shot at pulling this upset, the Cowboys were going to have to hit a ton of 3's, especially after getting down huge in the first half. That didn't happen, though.
The Cowboys ended the game just 6-28 from 3-point range. That's just 21.4% and that didn't help their efforts.
Meanwhile, Tech wasn't all that much better at 7-21 (33%). However, the Red Raiders weren't the team that needed a big night from deep because they dominated every other aspect of the game.
Texas Tech reaches 10 conference wins
This win put Tech at 10 wins in Big 12 play. That's an impressive number given the strength of the confernence. conference
What's more, it is only the sixth official time that Tech has had 10 Big 12 wins. The program technically had a 7th 10-win Big 12 season in 1996-97 but that season's wins were vacated because of NCAA violations.
McCasland is the second Texas Tech coach to reach the 10-win mark in Big 12 play in his first year with the program. The first was Mark Adams in 2021-22
That accomplishment doesn't feel like it measures up to what McCasland has done this year given that Adams was riding the wave of momentum from the Chris Beard era, not rebuilding the program from the group up as McCasland has this year. It's just another indication of the job that McCasland has done in year one, one of the best coaching jobs in Texas Tech basketball history.