Longhorns basketball ‘don’t have to play perfect’ but Rodney Terry demanding more urgency after UConn loss
Texas opens four-game home stand Thursday leading up to SEC opener at Texas A&M
Sunday’s 76-65 loss to UConn left Texas coach Rodney Terry with one stunning realization. The Longhorns must play harder.
“We don’t have to play perfect on offense,” Terry said Wednesday. “Never gonna ask guys to play perfect on defense. But we have to have a sense of urgency on how hard we play every possession.”
The Longhorns (7-2) likely thought things were going fine. Texas bounced back from a loss to Ohio State in the regular-season opener, won the Legends Classic in Brooklyn and even knocked off North Carolina State on the road in the SEC-ACC Challenge.
All good, right?
Sunday’s battle with the back-to-back national champions was a stunning eye-opener. Terry’s club shot 31% in the first half and fell behind by 22 just before the break. The Horns battled back in the second half, yet the Huskies had no trouble putting it away.
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“The thing that I said to our guys the other day after the ball game and even leading up to practice (Tuesday)… I think we’re at a point in our season right now where we have to be fully committed to really working on it, fixing the things we needed to fix from an offensive standpoint, defensive standpoint, and then we needed to have a really good level of urgency that we’re playing with,” Terry said.
“We cut. We have to have a purposeful cut on how hard we do it. We initiate offense. We have to initiate offense with a great pace of play, in terms of how we want to play. We sprint back on defense. We have to have 100-yard dash mentality getting back but being fully committed with a high level of urgency and being consistent with what we do.”
Terry is hammering this at every turn.
“That’s been the biggest thing that I've tried to preach here, between now and the time that we take a (holiday) break,” Terry added. “We have to have that. That has to be a point of who we are. We're committed, we have urgency, and we play with consistency.”
The Longhorns have also reached the point of the schedule where they should be building up some momentum prior to the start of SEC play.
Texas has four straight home games on deck, the first against New Mexico State at 7 p.m. Thursday. Games against Arkansas-Pine Bluff, New Orleans and Northwestern State should be victories where Terry can work on his rotation, and the Horns make last-minute adjustments.
Texas opens SEC play against — you guessed it — Texas A&M on Jan. 4. In College Station, no less.
Five SEC teams are currently in the Associated Press Top 25 poll. There are no free nights in league play. And it’s demonstrably harder if the Horns aren’t playing hard enough.
“I put the ownership on myself in that regard,” Terry said. “And I said, guys, I’m going to do a better job of teaching and working with you guys on how hard we have to cut, the spacing we have to have in the ball movement, player movement, we have to have offensively. Because I do believe that we can be a really good offensive team.”
