Steven Johnson: TCU sends statement with the way it beat No. 9 Texas
If I told you TCU star guard Mike Miles Jr. would be held without a field goal against No. 9 Texas, would you have been able to fathom the Horned Frogs winning?
That’s exactly what happened Wednesday night as the Horned Frogs supporting cast stepped up in a major way during what might’ve been Miles’ worst game in his storied TCU career.
Damion Baugh scored a career-high 24 points while adding nine assists. Emanuel Miller produced his second straight double-double with 20 points and 10 rebounds, including 14 points and six rebounds in the second half as Texas almost rallied back from 16 points down.
The win is massive for all the obvious reasons. The Horned Frogs are guaranteed to avoid a 7-10 seed in the Big 12 Conference Tournament which means one less game in Kansas City next week. Big picture? The win over the Longhorns should be good enough to keep sending TCU up the NCAA touranment seeding line.
Most importantly, it was the way TCU won that should encourage coach Jamie Dixon and the rest of the team the most. Beating a top-10 that has a backcourt like the Longhorns while your star guard is locked down? That’s incredibly difficult to do and it says a lot about the quality of the TCU roster outside of Miles.
“We’ve got balanced scoring, I know Mike stands out a lot, but we’ve played a lot without him,” Dixon said. “We talked about this not being pretty game because we know what they do and what we had to do. We got it done with defense and rebounding. It’s good to win a game when not everybody plays their best.”
Miles has missed eight of TCU’s 30 games this season and the Horned Frogs took their lumps without him, including a recent four-game losing streak.
But that time without Miles forced the roster to grow as they were placed into roles they weren’t accustomed to. It forced players like Baugh and JaKobe Coles to contribute more and while the losses piled up, so did the team’s growth.
And now with Miles back in the mix, TCU has a supporting cast that is ready to carry the load if Miles doesn’t have it one night.
“It’s just anybody’s game, everybody steps up when we need them to step up,” Baugh said postgame.
The win over the Longhorns answered a key question for March; would TCU be able to pull out a game if Miles is having an off day? We now know the answer is yes.
The second half of TCU’s win felt very much like a postseason game. All the transition opportunities that the Horned Frogs feasted on in the first half dried up. The game got mucked up with both teams throwing their bodies to the glass to try to get extra possessions for their teams.
Keep in mind Texas was playing for a lot. The Longhorns were trying to stay in the mix for a No. 1 seed and if the Longhorns won, Texas would’ve had a chance to play for a share of the Big 12 title in the regular season finale vs. Kansas.
That chance is off the table for the Longhorns. The Horned Frogs’ roster is almost the healthiest it’s been in months with Miles back in full swing plus the return of Eddie Lampkin Jr. and Rondel Walker. Despite not having a field goal, Dixon believes Miles was still a key part of TCU’s victory.
“We’ve won three out of four since (Mike’s) been back,” Dixon said. “That’s a pretty good sign. Obviously we have other guys, but not having him messed up our minutes. We can still win without him having a great game, but he’s a good defender so we needed him out there.”
Give a lot of credit to Texas for their gameplan against Miles. For one, not many teams in the country have defensive guards like Marcus Carr, Sir’Jabari Rice and others to throw at Miles in waves. The Longhorns face guarded Miles all night, even using two defenders to shadow him full court at times.
It was a calculated gamble by Texas coach Rodney Terry.
“Mike’s a big part of what they do,” Terry said. “It’s really hard to go into a game and say you’re going to shut down Mike Miles. Miles is a helluva player, preseason Player of the Year, you just try and contain him.”
His gamble almost paid off Texas almost erased another near 20-point TCU lead like the Longhorns did in Austin in January. But the results were different this time because the Horned Frogs are a different team than the one that collapsed nearly two months ago.
“Baugh played extremely well, he was aggressive from the outset, I thought he was a big difference,” Terry said. “Miller had two really good games against us this year, we knew he was a key guy that we had to try to do a good job on. They’re a good older team.”
You can take away one piece away from TCU, but the Horned Frogs have the firepower to survive an off night from a Miles, Baugh or Miller in March.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a contender to me.
This story was originally published March 2, 2023 at 11:52 AM.
