Texas Basketball: 3 takeaways from the OT collapse against Illinois

Dylan Disu’s disappearing act

Coming into this one, I talked about the importance of fourth-year big man Dylan Disu matching up well with a talented and versatile frontcourt for the Fighting Illini. Disu has played well at the five for most of the season for Beard and the Longhorns.

But Disu did anything but make an impact on this game. He played in just nine minutes before essentially getting benched throughout the second half and overtime.

And in the nine minutes that Disu was in the game, he managed just one point that came on a free throw. Disu wound up missing two attempts from the field, one of which came from beyond the arc.

Disu also put up a donut hole in all the other major stat categories in his nine minutes on the floor in the Jimmy V. Classic.

Now, I do want to mention that I don’t know if Disu is dealing with an injury coming out of this game. He dealt with a knee injury in the last couple of weeks that could still be bothering him.

However, it’s notable that Texas had to play small throughout most of this game. It worked for a while. But Texas also lucked out that a couple of key Illinois forwards/bigs got into foul trouble early in the second half (i.e. Dain Dainja and Matthew Mayer).

In place of Disu, Texas gave more key minutes to senior big man Christian Bishop and senior forward Brock Cunningham off the bench. Both Bishop and Cunningham had some struggles down low, but ultimately performed pretty well given the circumstances.

We will continue to monitor Disu’s status to see if there was anything health-wise that ultimately limited his minutes in this game. He did have knee surgery a couple of years ago before making his debut at Texas last season. And that was something that hampered him at times throughout last season.