Smart, Longhorns look to end three-game losing streak against Kansas State - The Dallas Morning News

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Texas basketball head coach Shaka Smart isn’t worried about his team playing with a sense of urgency as they turn down the final stretch of the season. In fact, he’s worried about the opposite.

Smart said in a Monday teleconference that the Longhorns played with so much urgency in their 75–67 double-overtime loss to Oklahoma State Saturday afternoon that it conceived a sense of avoidance as the team tried to dodge the big mistake.

But as Texas runs through the second half of its season, Smart is reminded that his players are 18-22-year-old human beings playing in the most unique season ever.

“(The players are) college student-athletes in a very, very uncommon time,” Smart said. “They’re not machines, so we’ve got to make sure that we factor in what they’re dealing with.”

Lately, the players have been dealing with a lot.

The Longhorns have only played three games in the last 22 days, including one without their head coach and two starters. Texas then only had one practice in which the full roster was cleared from Covid-19 protocols before playing No. 2 Baylor and traveled to Oklahoma State five days later.

Smart also confirmed the Longhorns went through a string of positive Covid tests in the last month, including himself.

“It’s been quite a journey (over the last 3-4 weeks). I hope I didn’t jinx us at the time, but about a month ago I told the guys, ‘You know adversity and challenges are going to occur over the course of this season,’” Smart said. “‘And the difference between the teams that really finish strong and have very successful seasons and the ones that don’t (will be) the ones that come closer together through adversity (and) through challenges.’ We’re kind of in the midst of that right now.”

Saturday’s loss to Oklahoma State put the Longhorns on their first three-game losing streak of the season and handed them their fourth defeat in five games after a 10-1 start. In this week’s AP Top 25, Texas fell from sixth to thirteenth and dropped out of the top-10 for the first time in 2021.

However, Smart and the Longhorns should have a relatively easy matchup Tuesday night against a Kansas State team sitting in ninth place in the Big 12 tomorrow evening in Manhattan, Kansas to help put Texas back on track.

Texas blew by the struggling Wildcats with an 82–67 win in their last matchup on Jan. 16, the Longhorns’ last victory, in which Texas took an early double-digit lead and never looked back.

Things haven’t looked promising for Kansas State since then.

The Wildcats haven’t won a game since Dec. 29 against the University of Omaha and are on an 11-game losing streak. They haven’t lost to a Big 12 team by fewer than 11 points during their streak.

Still, Smart knows that his load-bearing guard trio of senior Matt Coleman, junior Courtney Ramey and redshirt junior Andrew Jones will have to play better tomorrow night than they did against Oklahoma State to finally halt Texas’ three-game skid.

“Our three guards know we need them to play better on the offensive end than they did in the Oklahoma State game,” Smart said.  “I really liked the maturity that they seemed to have about them coming out of that game, but it’s about getting back on the court and actually putting together two really good halves.”

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