3 Texas basketball players to be thankful for this Thanksgiving

Brock Cunningham, F

I thought it would be appropriate to give one of the hardest-working men’s hoops players for the Longhorns in the last couple of decades a shout among those we should be thankful for this year.

Senior forward Brock Cunningham deserves a lot of love for the contributions and gritty plays he’s given Texas over the last few seasons. Cunningham became known as Texas’ grinder that is going to make those insane hustle plays and play really gritty and aggressive on-ball defense.

But in the last year and a half or so we saw Cunningham make some real strides in his game that weren’t there in the first couple of seasons of his collegiate career. Cunningham is a better shooter from deep, and he’s able to take on bigger matchups in the frontcourt on defense.

Cunnigham showed what he can do in one-on-one defense when he shut down the two-time All-American Gonzaga senior big man Drew Timme in Texas’ win over the Bulldogs last week. In the back half of the first half, Cunningham was sticking to Timme like glue.

And Cunningham continued to make a huge impact on Texas on both ends of the floor in the win over the Northern Arizona Lumberjacks to begin the Leon Black Classic on Nov. 21. He became the first major conference player in college hoops this season to register at least three steals and two blocks in no more than 20 minutes played in a game.

Even better was the fact that Cunningham didn’t turn the ball over once in the win over Northern Arizona earlier this week.

While it might not sound like much when looking at his box score stats on the season, he’s easily on pace to double most of his career-best per-game stats in a good portion of the major stat categories. And considering how I don’t think his role is going to diminish with the Longhorns anytime soon, expect his valuable two-way contributions to continue this season.