Texas Basketball: Latest ESPN Bracketology has Horns out of Big Dance

The latest edition of ESPN’s Bracketology from Joe Lunardi has the Texas basketball program still out of the NCAA Tournament.

With how hot the Texas basketball program was of late, they managed to work their way into the NCAA Tournament conversation. When it looked as if head coach Shaka Smart and his Texas team were dead in the water, he picked up all the pieces and won four straight games in Big 12 play. The last two wins for the men in burnt orange were two of the best of the season so far.

Last week, the Texas Longhorns basketball program managed to take down the No. 22 ranked Texas Tech Red Raiders and the No. 20 ranked West Virginia Mountaineers. The Longhorns got the best of the Mountaineers by a 10-point margin at home at the Frank Erwin Center. Meanwhile, Texas beat head coach Chris Beard and the Red Raiders on the road in Lubbock.

Texas beat both West Virginia and Texas Tech in impressive fashion. Those two wins compiled with others over the TCU Horned Frogs and the lowly nine-win Kansas State Wildcats to get the Longhorns the four-game winning streak they find themselves with at the moment.

Moreover, Texas holds a record of 18-11 (8-8 Big 12) after their win over Texas Tech last weekend. Texas sits tied with the rival Oklahoma Sooners in fourth place in the Big 12 standings. The only three teams that rank ahead of the Longhorns in the conference standings right now are the Kansas Jayhawks, Baylor Bears, and Texas Tech (in that order).

Next up for the Longhorns will be a battle with the Sooners in the next edition of the Red River Rivalry game on the hardwood. That comes on March 3 on the road in Norman. Both Oklahoma and Texas are hot of late and making a big push for single-digit seeds come Selection Sunday.

All the standout guard pairing of sophomore Courtney Ramey, junior Matt Coleman, and the Longhorns have left during the regular season slate is the Oklahoma schools. Senior Night and the regular season finale will come at home at the Erwin Center against head coach Mike Boynton and the Oklahoma State Cowboys on March 7.

However, will Ramey and Coleman be enough to get the Longhorns that final push into the NCAA Tournament? It surely seems like they can if they get one more win during the regular season, which would get them one step closer to 20 heading into the Big 12 Tournament and Selection Sunday.

Oklahoma State is pretty much out of NCAA Tournament for all intents and purposes. That is unless the Pokes got really hot at the right time and won the Big 12 Tournament, which isn’t likely to happen at all.

But not all are believers of the Longhorns chances yet to make it into the NCAA Tournament field. The latest edition of ESPN’s Bracketology from Joe Lunardi (released on March 2) had the Longhorns on the outside looking in still for Selection Sunday. Lunardi actually had Texas in the group of the “Next Four Out”, which also included the Purdue Boilermakers, Memphis Tigers, and South Carolina Gamecocks.

Texas did beat one of the other three teams in the Next Four Out for Lunardi in his latest edition of Bracketology. Smart really does need at least one more win to get them firmly into the NCAA Tournament field. Lunardi still has them behind the likes of the NC State Wolfpack, Mississippi State Bulldogs, Richmond Spiders, and Rhode Island Rams, in the “First Four Out”.

In the latest edition of ESPN’s College Basketball Power Index, the Longhorns still ranked outside the top 60 teams in Division I. That seems like slighting the Longhorns a bit, especially considering they rank in the top four teams in the Big 12 standings with two games remaining during the regular season.