Texas Basketball: How good defense isn’t translating to Longhorn wins
Where the trends start shifting
As mentioned on the last slide, there is an obvious correlation for the Texas basketball program this season between good defensive rating and points allowed per game and winning games. However, the problem is that the Longhorns have little to no correlation between the quality of their opposition and playing good defense.
The only top 25 opponent that Texas faced this season that they had a defensive rating over 100 against was the Kansas Jayhawks, in both games they played. Texas held Baylor and Texas Tech to under 65 points in three tries. Some opponents that had Texas finishing with a defensive rating at or above 100 against includes the McNeese State Cowboys, Iowa State Cyclones, and the Oklahoma Sooners.
Texas manages to get away with worse than usual defense, though, against those three teams that aren’t up to the quality of a Baylor or Kansas. They beat McNeese State in nailbiting fashion and also took down Iowa State. They lose by single-digits to Oklahoma too.
The Longhorns aren’t getting the consistency needed in conference play from their top players to get wins over the teams they need to beating to bolster their resume to get into the NCAA Tournament. Junior guard Matt Coleman struggled since the start of conference play this year.
Zoning in on Coleman’s trends in conference play in his three years with the Longhorns, his defensive rating improved each season against Big 12 competition. But his number of defensive win shares remained mostly steady in Big 12 play in the same period of time. He also doesn’t have a complete defensive win share in Big 12 play in any season of his collegiate career.
Sophomore guard Courtney Ramey is also usually pretty good on defense. Ramey has a career defensive box plus/minus rating of 2.4, and improved his defensive rating to below 99 this year. But Ramey’s number of defensive win shares dropped in conference play this year compared to last.
Texas relies heavily on their guard play, and despite Ramey and Coleman apparently playing better defense by the advanced numbers this year than last, it isn’t correlating to more overall win shares.