Bracket Matrix<\/a>, the Longhorns are a 9.9 seed on average with Lunardi currently slotting Texas solidly in the field because they aren\u2019t among the last eight teams in, but that position could be in jeopardy over the next three games in which Miller\u2019s team will be heavy underdogs before hosting 14th-place Oklahoma to close the regular season.<\/p>\nThe pressing challenge is Florida, the defending national champions who have won six straight road games since opening SEC play with a loss at Missouri. Over the last four road games, the Gators have an average margin of victory of 26.3 points per game, including victories over the Aggies in College Station and the Bulldogs in Athens.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they\u2019re playing their very best basketball of this season right now on a win streak in a dominant fashion over the last several road games in our league, not easy to do. They\u2019ve gone on the road, and they\u2019ve won by big, big margins,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
Florida\u2019s success start on the defensive end, where the Gators rank third in adjusted defensive efficiency, fueled by the nation\u2019s fourth-best defensive rebounding rate and an emphasis on running opponents off the three-point line and forcing them to play one-on-one basketball inside the arc, where Florida are sixth in opposing two-point field-goal percentage and the No. 53 block rate.<\/p>\n
The defense fuels the offense for the Gators, who are tied for 15th nationally with 16.3 fast-break points per game and play at the No. 35 adjusted tempo. As one of the worst three-point shooting teams in the country at 30.1 percent, Florida is able to produce the No. 14 offense in adjusted efficiency because they excel scoring around the basket, taking nearly 80-percent of their two-point shots and more than 45 percent of their overall attempts from the floor on close two-point shots.<\/p>\n
The frontcourt of 6\u20199 Thomas Haugh, 6\u201911 Alex Condon, and 6\u201911 Rueben Chinyelu all have 30 or more dunks this season and 94 0r more made baskets on close twos. Haugh and Condon also get to the line regularly, each attempting 151 free throws so far this season.<\/p>\n
If the Gators miss, ending defensive possessions with rebounds is extremely difficult \u2014 Florida is No. 2 in offensive rebounding rate at 44.2 percent.<\/p>\n
\u201cKeeping them off the glass is an immense challenge for every team that plays them, and we will be no different. How many second shots they get against us will be a big determining factor in the final score. We know that, so we have to be able to meet that challenge. I think the team that beats Florida, or the team that\u2019s right there to beat them, they\u2019re going to feel good about their rebounding in that game,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
Florida has lost to elite teams like Duke and UConn when rebounding well offensively, and has also won games against good teams without their its typically high-level offensive rebounding, but Texas hardly fits into the former category and struggles to fit into the latter category defensively in too many games.<\/p>\n
Miller called Saturday\u2019s loss to the Bulldogs the worst defensive performance this season by the Longhorns and the numbers back it up \u2014 it was the worst effort in adjusted defense, worse than the loss to Virginia and the win over Maryland-Eastern Shore.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you get this deep into the year, we\u2019ll go only as far as our defense will take us and our guys know that we had a couple guys, quite frankly, not play to the level that we demand. We\u2019ve addressed that,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
The Texas head coach also called this group, which currently ranks 141st in adjusted defense, the worst defensive team that he\u2019s had in his head coaching career. That\u2019s disappointing enough on its own, but when combined with an elite offense, it\u2019s all the more frustrating because the offensive success has come without the defense putting the offense in positions to succeed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing that\u2019s crazy about our offense is all of us benefit offensively from blocked shots, steals, defensive stops \u2014 some of our country\u2019s best offensive teams, part of their success story is their defense helps them. Florida is a great example of that. We get very little help on defense. Most of the time our offense is playing against a set defense,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
But is it possible for the Texas defense to improve down the stretch?<\/p>\n
\u201cI do believe that teams can improve as late as February and March. You see a version of it every year. Sometimes it\u2019s more of a quiet part of their story,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
And the Longhorns did have stretches of effective defense during the five-game winning streak, especially in reducing the number of bad fouls they commit.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at the games leading into Georgia, there are segments in each of those contexts where we defended probably to our best level. When you see that over a two-week stretch, I think you\u2019ve got evidence that you\u2019re able to do it. It\u2019s just a matter of sustaining it,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n
Regardless of whether the Longhorns are capable of sustaining that level of defensive success, Miller was adamant that he\u2019s looking forward to making changes on the Forty Acres to to be better defensively.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s offseason task. For now, Texas will try to hang in with Florida following the tip at 6 p.m. Wednesday on ESPN2 with a particular emphasis on keeping the Gators from getting off to hot starts at the beginning of both halves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a five-game winning streak ended with a 91-80 loss to the Georgia Bulldogs in Athens and with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167990,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29,79931],"class_list":["post-167989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-texas-longhorns-basketball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167989"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167989\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}