Iowa State 77, Texas 71

In foreboding fashion, the young Texas Longhorns dropped their first Big12 game of the season against Iowa State in Ames Wednesday night. Considering match-ups against even tougher Big12 squads including Kansas, Baylor, and Missouri yet to come, this was a game that Texas really needed to win. Unfortunately, Iowa State came out of the gate on fire from the 3-point line, hitting 9 of 12 in the first half on the way to a 10-point halftime lead. The Longhorns made a serious run in the 2^nd half, with junior J’Covan Brown practically carrying his team on his back. But Brown rolled his ankle on a slicing drive to the basket and the wheels pretty much fell off from that point on for the Longhorns.

There was a crucial moment late, when Texas cut the Cyclones lead to 6 with about 2 minutes to play. Freshman point guard Myck Kabongo had the ball at the top of the key, wide open for a very reasonable 3-point shot attempt, and inexplicably he passed it up. It led to a sloppy Clint Chapman turnover and basically a loss for the Longhorns. Evidently, Kabongo’s once-flourishing confidence has fallen by the wayside via Coach Rick Barnes and his archaic insistence on teaching by way of negative reinforcement. With all respect due to Coach Barnes, he has in recent weeks manufactured yet another disaster in which his players get completely bogged down by his heavy-handed approach to discipline.

The way Iowa State was sagging on defense against Kabongo the entire game, it’s as if they knew beforehand that Kabongo would be playing as if handcuffed by a curmudgeon. For some odd reason, Barnes also decided that this would be the game where the entire offense would be run through Clint Chapman, who responded well with a career game of 19 points and 14 rebounds, but who also threw in his usual share of off-plays and crucial blunders. Meanwhile in his second start of the season, Jaylen Bond did absolutely nothing in 11 minutes of play, a poor performance rivaled only by the even more worthless 10 minutes of off-the-bench play from Alexis Wangmene.

Wangmene perfectly illustrates the most glaring deficiency of Barnes as a coach, in that Alexis has been with the team 4 years now and has failed to show any significant signs of improvement. Wangmene’s hands are so bad that he is a gross liability on offense and even at his strong suit as a defensive rebounder, he all too often flubs the ball right back into the hands of an opposing offensive player. And did you see Wangmene trying to guard Iowa State’s Royce White out on the perimeter? Wangmene might as well have only been waving a white napkin at White as he continually drove around Alexis at will.

Freshmen Sheldon McClellan and Julien Lewis had poor shooting nights, going a combined 4-19, and that’s just going to happen sometimes, especially on the road. But what in the world is Barnes doing with Jonathan Holmes, who at this stage of the season should be a much more prominent contributor? Yes, Holmes has a tendency to reach on defense, which leads to fouls. And no, he’s not the best rebounder on the planet. But Holmes is exactly who Barnes should be developing right now instead of thinking that Clint Chapman is going to somehow instantly transform himself from an inconsistent mop-up man to the focal point of the offense.

Obviously, I just don’t get it with Barnes. He has said in the media before that rather than being out to win championships at Texas, his job is to prepare individual Longhorns for future careers in the NBA. And that statement does indeed speak volumes to his methods. But to essentially sabotage his team’s success year in and year out over nitpicky nuances that he seems to think only overbearing, drill-sergeant tactics can cure simply frustrates me to no end. By now, it should be clear to anyone that Barnes needs to rethink his approach. And short of calling for his job, the time has come for UT Athletic Director DeLoss Dodds to really get at Barnes not just for his teams’ underperformance but for the lack of fan support that comes from so much disappointment. We can cite that this year’s Longhorns team is far too freshman-heavy to warrant top flight expectations. But is that how a freshman-laden team is evaluated at a Kentucky or a North Carolina? No, their freshmen are expected to excel, and quite often do in both consistent and spectacular fashion.

Myck Kabongo is infinitely talented. There is no reason for him to be negatively motivated into a mere shell of his full potential. Jonathan Holmes doesn’t need to be yanked out of the game every single time he makes a less than fatal error. And if Barnes ran a more structured offense, it wouldn’t be so much up to Sheldon McClellan and Julien Lewis to create shots off of whimsical tangents. These fine players that Barnes has recruited to Texas are currently regressing right before our eyes. Of course, it is ultimately up to each one of them to improve on their own accord, through hard work and the awareness to actually learn from their mistakes, but Barnes needs to be helping that process instead of hindering it.

The Longhorns are now 10-4 on the season, with tough home games against Oklahoma State and Texas A&M scheduled within the next week. All is certainly not lost for Texas, but now is the time for the Horns to get their butts in gear, or this may wind up the first NCAA Tournament appearance that has eluded Texas in quite some time.