Horns right the ship with win over Baylor

By Steve Habel – Associate Editor

There were a handful of times Wednesday during the Texas men’s basketball team’s 74-69 victory over Baylor at the Erwin Center that the Longhorns looked like they were ready to spit the bit and fumble away an 18-point lead that they worked so hard to forge in the first half.

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But thanks to some key late buckets by Jonathan Holmes and a 20-point, 10-rebound performance from Cameron Ridley, the Horns held on and exorcized some demons taken on by back-to-back blowout conference losses on the road to Kansas and Iowa State last week.

“As much progress we’ve made this year we can let it get away from [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)] us real quick, so we knew this game was no different,” Holmes said.

Texas is now 21-7 and 10-5 in the Big 12, which is the toughest basketball league in the land, and is currently projected as a sixth seed in the NCAA tournament by ESPN and a five-seed by both CBS Sports and SI.com.

Those are pretty lofty spots considering that the Horns were predicted to finish eighth in the Big 12 when the league’s coaches were polled before the season began.

Against Baylor, a talented but somewhat enigmatic team that had won four straight games before Wednesday night and is on the bubble for a spot in the NCAAs.

In the first half, the Horns rode the outside shooting of Jevon Felix, who scored 21 points (all from beyond the 3-point arc, 15 of those in the opening 20 minutes) and literally stood around through stretches of the second half as Baylor cut the lead to one point.

“Mentally we haven’t done the details the last couple of weeks and I think it showed up when things weren’t going perfectly well tonight,” Texas coach Rick Barnes said. We did a good job when (Baylor) pushed back. When we had to come down in the end and execute, we did.”

Texas has three regular season games left, TCU at home on March 5 sandwiched between road tilts at Oklahoma (March 1) and Texas Tech (March 8). Winning out – and even capturing two of three, which is more likely – will help the Longhorns move to a higher seed in the Big 12 tournament (March 12-15 in Kansas City) and then in the NCAAs.

A lot is still to be decided in the next two and half weeks, but this Texas basketball team has been a surprise so far in 2013-14 and it would be foolish to sell them short now.

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