Rodney Terry says defense led Texas to win vs. West Virginia

The Texas defense came to play in its matchup Saturday against West Virginia.

The Longhorns forced 20 turnovers in a 69-61 victory over the Mountaineers. Those turnovers led to 19 points for Texas.

On the other side, the Longhorns committed only 13 turnovers that led to just 10 West Virginia points.

Rodney Terry said after the game that the defensive performance and turnovers forced from his Texas team was a real difference maker.

“That was big for us — it really was,” Terry said. “I think at the half we had 10 at the half. So that was one stat that jumped out at us at halftime that we were doing a great job. Only thing with that was we had nine ourselves, which was causing the problems a little bit for us there of not taking care of the basketball. But I thought we did a much better job in the second half. We finished with four turnovers. We changed the game in that regards. I thought our guys played really hard. I thought we did a better job tonight finishing possessions. I thought we played really hard and had a great effort early in the week against Iowa State. We just didn’t finish his possessions.”

Rodney Terry wasn’t the only highlighting the key to Texas’ defense

West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins also discussed the turnovers created by the Texas defense in Saturday’s game.

Huggins said the turnovers were extremely frustrating to watch as he thought his Mountaineers team had evolved past being such a sloppy team.

“We had opportunities but we’ve had opportunities in the other games that we lost too and we didn’t seize opportunities,” Huggins said. “Can’t turn the ball over 20 times. We talked about that earlier in the year, said we were gonna fix it. We had it down to where we were turning it over maybe six times a game, which isn’t good, but it’s way better than 20. Now we’re back to 20 and not playing against pressure. We just throw the ball to the wrong team.”