TCU basketball had forgettable week. What concerns Jamie Dixon the most?
TCU hasn’t been competitive in consecutive games.
The Frogs’ road woes continued last week with blowout losses at Texas Tech by 19 points last Monday, and at Baylor by 26 points on Saturday. The 26-point loss is the worst defeat in Jamie Dixon’s young tenure at TCU.
The Frogs are now 0-5 in Big 12 road games. But Dixon isn’t concerned about the team’s morale.
“Morale is fine. Morale’s fine,” Dixon said, adamantly after the whipping in Waco.
“We know we’ve lost on the road. It’s one loss. We’ve got to find a way to get …”
Dixon finished his thought by saying: “We’ll be healthy on Monday and Tuesday, and get ready to go on Wednesday [against Oklahoma State].”
Yes, TCU has been battling injuries -- and departures with four players entering the NCAA transfer portal -- all season.
The latest is senior point guard Alex Robinson, who sustained an apparent wrist injury late in the Baylor game but posted on his social media account that he’d be fine by Wednesday.
Another significant piece for the Frogs, junior guard Desmond Bane, didn’t practice with sickness last week and that might have played a role in him failing to score in the first half for a second straight game.
“We didn’t have good practices,” Dixon said. “[Bane] wasn’t there. You take him out, it doesn’t allow us to do much stuff.”
Bane is one of the Frogs’ best shooters and he’s been the leading scorer in each of TCU’s three Big 12 wins this season. He had 22 points in the first meeting against Baylor in the conference-opening win last month; he scored a season-high 26 points against West Virginia; and he had 17 against Texas.
Clearly, Bane is a difference-maker who has to get going earlier in games. He acknowledged that after Saturday’s game.
“Maybe I do need to be a little more aggressive,” Bane said, “but we’ll continue to do what we’ve been doing all year to get us 15 wins.”
But offense isn’t the top concern for Dixon or TCU. Instead, it’s the defense.
The same defense that showed flashes in grind-it-out wins over Texas and Florida before Tech and Baylor posted the highest point totals on TCU this season.
Texas Tech and Baylor each shot more than 50 percent from the field. The Red Raiders made 54.2 percent of their shots, and the Bears topped that by draining 55.6 percent of theirs.
It helped Baylor that senior guard Makai Mason had a career night with 40 points.
“We haven’t played well on the road and the last two haven’t been very good obviously,” Dixon said. “Defense is not there. That’s something we’ve got to figure out. We’re going to go work on it.”
As stated, the morale remains fine for the Frogs. The confidence level is fine too.
“It hasn’t wavered at all,” Bane said. “We’re in the Big 12, the best conference in the country. There’s going to be ups and downs throughout the whole thing. We know who we are and we know what we have our identity in. We’ll get back to defending on Wednesday.”