Texas Basketball: 3 takeaways from convincing loss to No. 4 Tennessee

A tough road environment for acting head coach Rodney Terry and No. 10 Texas basketball to play in this weekend ultimately got the best of them. Former Texas head coach Rick Barnes and the No. 4 Tennessee Volunteers topped Texas at Thompson-Boling Arena in Knoxville as part of the SEC/Big 12 Challenge on Jan. 28 by the final score of 82-71.

This was a much higher-scoring game than most originally anticipated, myself included. I picked Texas to lose to Tennessee in this game by a score of 65-61. Instead, both offenses produced at a higher level and played at a faster tempo than I thought would be the case in this one.

And while I would’ve said before this game that if Texas was able to be the first team since the Arizona Wildcats last month to score more than 70 points on the Vols while also boasting the fourth player this season to get someone at least 20 points against them, I would feel really good. But the defense ultimately was lacking for the Longhorns.

Tennessee scoring more points against a ranked opponent than it did since the fall of 2021 (against the No. 18 North Carolina Tar Heels) would bite the Longhorns in the end.

Marcus Carr and Texas basketball fall to Olivier Nkamhoua and Tennessee

Here’s a look at three takeaways from the Longhorns’ convincing 11-point loss to Tennessee on Jan. 28.

Marcus Carr struggles to hit the contested deep ball, while Sir’Jabari Rice shines

This might be the most obvious takeaway on the list that senior guard Marcus Carr struggled mightily throughout this game to find his shot from beyond the arc.

Carr went just 1-of-6 shooting from deep, which is his worst three-point shooting output since the comeback win over the TCU Horned Frogs a couple of weeks ago. The annoying part is that if he had just found a little bit more room to get some cleaner looks from deep, this would be an all-around solid game we’d be talking about for the fifth-year senior.

Despite going just 1-of-6 shooting from beyond the arc, Carr still finished up scoring in double figures, with 11 points. He shot 4-of-12 from the field and was perfect on two attempts from the charity stripe.

Carr also made a positive impact on this game in other ways. He was pretty solid on defense with two steals and only turned the ball over once on the evening.

But while Carr was still trying to find his offensive game in different ways, senior shooting guard/wing Sir’Jabari Rice shined for the Longhorns. The fellow fifth-year senior had potentially his best outing of the season on the offensive end of the floor for Texas.

Rice finished up this game with a team and season-high 21 points on 8-of-16 shooting from the field, 3-of-9 from beyond the arc, and 2-of-4 from the free-throw line.

There weren’t many other contributions that Rice made to this game for the Longhorns in terms of what you could see on the box score numbers. But the fact of the matter is that Rice kept Texas at least hanging around in this game at different times in the second half.

This type of offensive output from Rice is something that will be ultra-valuable for the Longhorns down the stretch.