Texas's offseason focus could send Horns even further in March Madness

The Texas Longhorns watched their season come to an end on a buzzer-beating tip-in shot by the Purdue Boilermakers. Head coach Sean Miller is making sure a game never comes down to the wire like that again.

Bringing one of his coaching traditions to the 40 Acres, Miller has had the team shoot thousands, and I mean thousands, of free throws over the summer, perfecting the art of shooting from the stripe.

And it already looks like it will pay off.

This summer, the Horns made 24,550 of their 27,648 free-throw attempts. That's an average of 88.8% across the board, with freshman guard Joe Sterling blowing expectations out of the water by shooting 98.8% from the charity stripe.

"When you talk about 'free-throws win games and championships,' I think that everybody knows what that means," Miller said in a recent video clip. "Since I've started to do this, I've never had a team that's checked in as a group, every player on the team, [at] 88.8%."

Simply put, there won't be any room for critics to point to the Longhorns missing free throws as the reason Texas lost any games. The Horns lost to Purdue by just two points, and they missed seven free throws throughout the game, shooting just 53% from the line. Imagine if they had been shooting nearly 89% on their free throw attempts. We'd be looking at a berth in the Elite Eight instead of a return flight to Austin.

Throughout the season, the Horns shot 75.2% on free-throw attempts. Not bad, but not necessarily good either. Miller is making sure that the team isn't just good at the stripe, but great.

Sean Miller's attention to detail will take Texas far

Including the NCAA Tournament loss to Purdue, there were six games during the 2025-26 season that the Horns lost by five points or fewer, including ranked matchups against teams like the Duke Blue Devils and Tennessee Volunteers.

Had Texas simply performed better from the line, those games easily could have gone in the Horns' favor, changing their overall record from 21-15 to 27-9.

See how easily these minute details can make massive changes? If the Longhorns had simply shot better from the free-throw line, we could have seen an entirely different season. Miller is ensuring that this kind of detail will never be the reason the Horns lose or their season ends.

This team already has more talent than Texas has seen in a long time, and the fact that Miller is taking them one step further (in every area of their game) is exactly why the Longhorns hired him.

Get ready to see a good team this winter, and expect nothing less than an even deeper run in the NCAA Tournament this spring.

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