Frogs look to stay “angry” in showdown with Kansas on Saturday

TCU was an “angry” basketball team when it played Baylor on Tuesday night and hopes to stay that way for Saturday’s game against Kansas.

“We just went there angry and wanted to beat everybody,” forward Kouat Noi said.

The Horned Frogs were coming off a “gut-wrenching” loss, as coach Jamie Dixon described it, to Oklahoma. The Frogs had rallied from an 11-point deficit to start the game to eventually lead by 13 in the middle of the second half, only to lose 90-89.

Against Baylor on Tuesday night, the Frogs lost a 12-point lead, missed a shot to win at the buzzer, then won in overtime 81-78.

“That was a gut-wrenching, heartbreaking loss to Oklahoma for a lot of reasons, the main being that we were up 13 and let it get away from us,” Dixon said. “Disappointment in the plays and calls down the stretch and the execution. So you’ve got to respond, and we came out angry and focused and committed against Baylor to get that lead. But at the same time, we let them back in.”

The 16th-ranked Frogs (13-1, 1-1), who now host No. 10 Kansas (11-3, 1-1) on Saturday night, liked the feeling of playing angry.

“The last two practices, we were playing physical, playing mad,” forward JD Miller said. “We’ve got to go out there and play mad every game, to be honest.”

Can they?

“For sure, that’s going to happen every game,” he said. “I can tell you that right now.”

TCU is probably right to be mad at the lost opportunity. But at 1-1 through two league games, the Frogs can take stock considering their loss is to the team with the league’s top-scoring player and that they at least now have a road win.

The Baylor victory snapped an 11-game losing streak in the series for TCU.

“We’re excited about the conference, excited where it is, believe it’s wide open, anybody can win it,” Dixon said. “Two games in, I think that feeling is still there. For us, we understand we’ve had two games now against two really good teams and we’ve been up 12, 13 points and we’ve got to find a way to maintain.”

TCU leads the Big 12 in shooting (51.4 percent) and is the league’s second-highest scoring team, averaging 87.1 points.

Against Kansas, the Frogs will face the league’s third-highest scoring team (86.8 points per game) and tops in assist-to-turnover ratio.

This story was originally published January 4, 2018 at 3:38 PM with the headline "Frogs look to stay “angry” in showdown with Kansas on Saturday."