Shooting From the Corner: Georgia 98, Texas 88

The NET system may not consider this a bad loss by their metrics, but it was a bad loss by mine. Texas is a better team than Georgia in most any meaningful statistic and should be a nice break from conference play, but I guess the Texas players took the idea of a break a bit too literally because - to put it mildly - their effort was not where it needed to be. I’m going to put as much effort into this recap as Texas did into playing defense:

Matt Coleman sucked, his first four fouls were all awful and he pushed himself out of playing time by playing dumb basketball. In a game where taking care of the ball was in short supply, him sitting on the bench due to dumb fouls was a significant factor.

Dylan Osetkowski needs to start getting yanked for taking contested threes early in the shot clock. He’s barely making enough open threes, the idea he has a green light taking a contested three with 20+ seconds left on the shot clock should earn him an earful. Go rebound, dunk, and use your passing ability to hit other open shooters.

Courtney Ramey: you’re fine, keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe study up on how to spot a back cut before your guy is halfway to the rim though.

Jaxson Hayes: you can grab rebounds on both ends of the floor, it’s not illegal. You’re 6’11” with the wingspan of a whooping crane and you helped let Georgia grab offensive rebounds on 45% of their misses which is the kind of rebounding rate Bob Huggins uses late at night when he can’t get Pornhub to load.

Jase Febres was also fine. The only reason Febres was under 40% from three is because he had to start throwing up contested threes at the end to try to haul this club of uber-talented dipshits back into the game.

Jericho Sims also had a decent effort in limited minutes.

Texas forced 26 turnovers, shot 43% from three, had 17 steals, and lost by ten. That’s actually impressive in a way.

Every game is going to talk about Texas being on the bubble until they show they’re off it, so hammer the over on in-game Lunardi appearances if you haven’t already.

The buyout is still somewhere north of $13 million, and I don’t think the Minister of Culture is interested in ponying up a dime. You’re welcome to dream about Fred Hoiberg all you want, but until you get that check cut it’s only going to be a dream.

(By all accounts, Fred’s staying in the NBA anyway.)

If you were wondering what the best possible salve would be for a team in the midst of an identity crisis, Kansas comes to town Tuesday at 6 PM. So that should be fun.

The game is on ESPN.

BWG’s writing tunes provided by Raul Mezcolanza.