Kansas State 84, Texas 80

Wednesday night saw the Texas Longhorns put up a scrappy fight against the Kansas State Wildcats in Manhattan, Kansas. Unfortunately, a late Texas rally fell short on a last-second, botched hand-off between Myck Kabongo and J'Covan Brown, causing Kansas State to win the game 84-80. Down by 2 with the ball and no time-outs, with 12 enormous offensive seconds on the clock, Kabongo and Brown managed to cross themselves up right across the half court line. Resulting in a brutal turnover, leading to a Kansas State dunk on the other end of the court, the backcourt mishap negated a valiant struggle for the Longhorns to erase what was once a 15-point Wildcats' lead.

J'Covan Brown both took us out of the game, then brought us back into it with his streaky shooting. Brown's rough 8-28 shooting night singlehandedly dragged his team's overall percentage down from an impressive 61% to a losing 46%. But of course it was Brown at the end of the game hitting a pair of clutch baskets to put the Longhorns in a position to steal the road win. In this case, the highly inconsistent wing duo of Sheldon McClellan and Julien Lewis impressed by combining to shoot 9-15 from the floor. Kabongo scored 14 points on 5-8 shooting and played his heart out, but managed to tarnish his 10 skillful assists with 6 sloppy turnovers. And Texas definitely missed scoring opportunities from Jonathan Holmes who fouled out of the game in only 9 minutes of scattered play.

This, our 3rd loss out of 5 Big12 conference games so far this season, was an especially hard one to swallow. All that effort to set up the potential game-clinching, closing possession, and with ample time on the clock, the Longhorns couldn't even get a shot off. With nothing but ordinary defensive pressure applied by the Wildcats, the Horns barely even got the ball past half-court. Of course, people will just shrug their shoulders and say something about "freshmen" and I suppose that's true and this game will ultimately get chalked up as a learning experience. But right this moment, we are on the bubble when it comes to the NCAA tournament. We desperately need a quality win, as we haven't had one since Temple and really that might have been our only quality win so far this season. And it only gets more difficult beyond Manhattan. #7 Kansas is next on the schedule, then an Iowa State team that has already beaten us, then #3 Baylor, and then #5 Missouri. Yikes, but at the same time, hopefully the stage is set for not just a quality win, but a signature win.