Texas men’s basketball hosts Central Michigan Saturday

By Riley Zayas

Taking it one battle at a time, the Texas men’s basketball team defeated two worthy opponents this past week, UAB at home and their longtime rivals Texas A&M in Fort Worth. In fact, the win over the Aggies was UT’s third over a team from a Power 5 conference this season and only further solidified the fact that Texas head coach Shaka Smart’s team is here to stay on the college hoops landscape this season. But Smart said [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]he continues to see a lot of room for improvement from week to week, and praised their ability to balance a tough academic schedule while still producing on the court. 

“Obviously, this is the time of year when everyone is trying to become who they’re going to become,” Smart was quoted saying by 247 Sports. “I told our guys in the locker room after the game that I give them a lot of credit because this was our heaviest academic week of the whole year. Those guys practiced hard. You could tell there was some mental fatigue, but, you know, we’re not the only ones going to class. Other schools are, too. It’s part of being a student-athlete and the guys did a great job with it.” 

Smart’s team will get a much-needed and much-deserved week off from game action before they take the floor again Saturday afternoon against Central Michigan at the Frank Erwin Center.

If there’s one thing about Central Michigan to point out right off the bat, it’s that the Chippewas are a team that can score. Although they lost leading scorers Larry Austin and Shawn Roundtree, their offense hasn’t taken too much of a hit thanks to junior college transfer guard Devontae Lane, who has led the team in scoring the past two ballgames, and guards Kevin McKay and Dallas Morgan, each of whom has scored a team-high 141 points this season. Another scorer to keep an eye on also happens to be their best rebounder: 6-foot-7-inch forward Rob Montgomery, who has played for three colleges in the past four years and averages 5.7 rebounds per game in his second year at CMU. 

But the reason for a somewhat pedestrian 7-4 record (three of those wins came against non D1 teams), has been the Central Michigan defense. With the Chippewas running a zone defense, the Longhorns should be able to get the ball to athletic threats in the post, where guys like Jase Febres, Will Baker and Jericho Sims will try to work the ball into the paint for shots or kick it out to one of the outside shooters for an open three. So far, opponents have averaged 70 points per game against the Chippewas, though that stat was helped out by early-season victories against teams like Trinity Christian and Michigan-Dearborn.

CMU has not appeared in the NCAA Tournament since 2003. But despite small steps in the right direction, the program is still in a rebuilding mode, and a team that the Longhorns could defeat with ease as long as they keep the same mindset they’ve had these past few weeks and stick with the same mentality Smart vocalized after the A&M showdown, when he followed UT’s win by declaring “we can certainly be better.”
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