Kansas State Wildcats remain winless in Big 12 following lopsided loss at Texas
Makol Mawien caught the ball under the basket without a defender in his vicinity, and it looked like Kansas State was about to collect its first points of the second half after a lengthy scoring drought. But things didn’t play out that way.
As Mawien turned to the hoop and extended his right arm up for a layup, Texas big man Jericho Sims swooped in to force a miss from point-blank range.
That’s the kind of night it was for K-State during a 64-50 loss against the Longhorns on Saturday at the Erwin Center. Just about everything that could go wrong for the Wildcats did go wrong, even when it looked like things were going to turn out right.
By the time K-State managed to score its first points of the second half, with 12 minutes remaining on the clock, Texas had pulled ahead by 16 and effectively locked up the game.
With the loss, the Wildcats (7-8, 0-3 Big 12) are off to their worst start since 2002 when Jim Wooldridge was the coach. They also joined Oklahoma State as the only two winless teams in conference play. With the win, the Longhorns (11-4, 1-2) snapped a losing streak and reminded some of how they began the season 9-1.
Cartier Diarra led K-State with 14 points, but he didn’t play all that well overall, missing 10 shots from the field and failing to get his teammates more involved as the point guard. He also made two critical errors in the second half that led to Mawien picking up his third foul 27 seconds into the half and a desperation three-pointer from David Sloan.
Matt Coleman led the Longhorns with 14 points.
The defeat ended a hectic day for the K-State basketball team, which arrived in Austin four hours before tip because of flight delays. The Wildcats were originally scheduled to depart Manhattan on a charter flight on Friday, but icy weather canceled flights across the region. They rescheduled their flight to Saturday morning but didn’t end up leaving the Sunflower State until 1:15 p.m. because of mechanical issues.
No team will ever blame a loss on travel issues, but the change in routine certainly didn’t help the Wildcats in this one. They will try to bounce back in their next game on Tuesday against Texas Tech at home.
At least they lost in a new way. Instead of playing Texas tough for 35 minutes and then letting things slip away in the final moments, this game got away from the Wildcats early in the second half when they went 8 minutes without scoring while the Longhorns went on a 12-0 run.
It was an ugly stretch of basketball for K-State, which saw five possessions end with shot-clock violations.
Texas put an exclamation mark on the run with an alley-oop layup from Andrew Jones.
The first half was also not a thing of beauty.
Texas began the game with three-pointers on its first three possessions to take a 9-2 lead but then cooled off from there as K-State spent the next 18 minutes playing catch-up. The Wildcats pulled ahead at various times in the first half behind the sharp play of Diarra and Xavier Sneed, but the Longhorns took a 31-27 lead into the locker room.
K-State’s scored the bulk of its points off Texas turnovers early, as the Wildcats turned 11 giveaways into 16 points. Their transition offense was much more effective than their half-court sets.
Longhorns forward Kamaka Hepa ended the half with a three-pointer that beat the buzzer by one-tenth of a second. But that was nothing new for them. Texas beat the shot clock by draining four outside shots in the first half, turning possessions that looked like they were going to swing K-State’s way into baskets.
That happened quite a bit on Saturday.
This story was originally published January 11, 2020 at 9:25 PM with the headline "Kansas State Wildcats remain winless in Big 12 following lopsided loss at Texas."