Rodney Terry details how Texas overcame slow start against Rice

The Texas Longhorns have been playing like one of the best teams in college basketball for much of the 2022-2023 season thus far. They currently sit at 8-1 overall and are ranked No. 7 in the country in the latest AP Top 25 Poll. That doesn’t make them immune from slow starts or droughts here and there. That’s inevitable for even the very best of college basketball teams from time to time. The Longhorns started out slow against the Rice Owls in their game on Monday. The ‘Horns trailed 33-29 after the first half, but eventually battled back to force overtime and prevail, 87-81. Following the overtime victory, Longhorns interim head coach Rodney Terry spoke with the media, and he said his team wasn’t surprised at all by the Owls’ hot start.

“Well, we knew Rice was gonna come in. They’re a team that only shoots 25 threes a game. They make nine threes a game, so you know, we knew coming in that shooting defense was gonna be really big for us. Obviously, they did a really good job in the first half on the glass. They were doing a great job getting some offensive rebounds,” Terry said.

The Texas interim head coach noted that his guys were ready to play early.

“I think to start the game, though, our guys were really amped up to play. Our guys were excited about playing. We really framed this [as] 80 minutes of game that we have prior to the Stanford game (Dec 18th). [It was a] game that we still wanted to continue to get better tonight,” Terry said.

Terry made sure to give Rice plenty of credit for their hot start in the first half.

“Again, I thought our guys were, I thought they were ready to play initially. Again, those guys came out and made some shots. You give them a lot of credit in terms of really making us have to sit down and guard a little harder and a little bit better,” the Longhorns interim head man said.

“But again, through it all, we’re gonna be in games like this all year. We’ve already been in an overtime situation already. We knew at that time, at winning time, we’ve been here already. Those guys were hoping the game was over already and we were still ready to play five more minutes. But again, my message to our guys was no matter what kind of start we get off to–whether it’s a good start, bad start, we’re gonna work the game for 40 minutes and we’re gonna continue to work on playing with urgency,” Terry said.

The Longhorns were carried by their star guard, Marcus Carr, in the overtime victory. He poured in 28 points in 41 minutes of work, connecting on 4-of-7 shots from beyond-the-arc. Carr also grabbed three boards and dished out three assists.