Texas Men’s Basketball completes regular season taking down Kansas 75-59
Game highlights along with action photos from courtside.
AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Men’s Basketball concluded the regular season by stopping Kansas 75-59 at the Moody Center and earned the No. 2 seed for the Big 12 Men’s Basketball Championships, the best seed since 2011.
Texas allowed Kansas to lead the game for the first couple minutes at the beginning of the game, then applied a defense Kansas could not overcome for the rest of the game. Selected by Big 12 head coaches, Big 12 Sixth Man Award winner Sir’Jabari Rice scored a game-high 23 points, grabbed a team-high seven rebounds and had a 27 Efficiency after 27 minutes of play.
Tyrese Hunter scored 20 points, went to the free throw line for a game-high 10 times, making nine.
Texas beat Kansas by 16 points that can be derived by Texas hitting 25-55 (45%) from the field, and 19-24 (79%) from the free throw line. Kansas had 11 turnovers, though Texas only converted those to eight points.
While total rebounds were about the same with Texas the slight edge (36-34), Texas’ defensive rebounds (32) helped contribute to the 17 fast-break points where Kanas had just four fast-break points.
Texas fans made a big difference in the game. Kansas head coach Bill Self commented in the postgame news conference about the atmosphere and looked toward Chris Del Conte sitting in the press gallery and asked how they piped so much noise into the Moody Center.
In the first year each Texas Men’s Basketball played to a sellout crowd every 17 games at the Moody Center and went 16-1. .
Texas completed the regular season 6-0 against AP Top 25 teams and 3-0 against AP Top 10 teams at the Moody Center beating No. 2 Gonzaga, No. 3 Kansas, and No. 7 Creighton.
Texas will play in the quarterfinal-round against either No. 7 seed Oklahoma State or No. 10 seed Oklahoma Mar. 9 at 6 p.m.
