FAYETTEVILLE — Mike Neighbors knows this week is important for his Arkansas women’s basketball team.
With the Razorbacks (18-9, 6-6 SEC) on the NCAA Tournament bubble in late February for the third consecutive season and with four games left on the regular-season schedule, games this week against Texas A&M and Vanderbilt will determine Arkansas’ postseason fate.
Arkansas will begin the critical two-game stretch Thursday at 7 p.m. in College Station, Texas, against Texas A&M (17-8, 5-7), a team one game behind the Razorbacks in the SEC standings, and finish it Sunday in Fayetteville against Vanderbilt (19-8, 6-7), which trails by 1/2 game.
The three teams are bunched at seventh, eighth and ninth place in the SEC standings. Perhaps more importantly, Arkansas, Texas A&M and Vanderbilt are jockeying for at-large berths to the Big Dance.
Neighbors, in his seventh season coaching Arkansas, gave the two-game stretch a name: Separation Week. The Razorbacks have to separate themselves from the rest of the group.
“You can’t avoid it,” Neighbors said. “You don’t necessarily have to talk about it and harp on it, but you have this week sometime in February. [If you] look historically where we have been, it’s always sometime in February we have a week like this.
“It’s important that we do have good practice, good travel and everything goes as smooth as it can so we can hopefully peak at the right time.”
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ESPN’s most recent “Bracketology” forecasts Texas A&M, Vanderbilt and Auburn — three teams below Arkansas in the SEC standings — among the last four teams in the field of 68 teams. The Razorbacks are projected among the first four left out.
Arkansas ended on the right side of the bubble in 2022 but was left out in 2023. Neighbors is relying on his returning players who felt the pain of being excluded from the NCAA Tournament last season to understand the situation.
“I don’t have to go in there with a big speech or a big presentation to let them know,” Neighbors said. “They read social media and they read the real news. They know it’s a big week. We won’t harp on it any extra.”
He noted that experience fighting for postseason positioning may help his team feel less pressure this go-round.
“It’s kind of like going to altitude for the first time,” Neighbors said. “The first time you’re in altitude, you think you’re going to die because you can’t breathe. And then the next time you go, you expect it. You can breathe and you can have a good time.
“And the third time you go, you can breathe and hike and play golf….So I think hopefully it’s helpful to us to know that [games are] all still worth one [on the team’s record], but they do tend to magnify as you start to run out of games on the back end of that deal, down to four regular season games.”
The Aggies and Razorbacks will each likely be missing their top scorer.
Texas A&M guard Endyia Rogers leads the team with 12.8 points and 4 assists per game but has missed the Aggies’ last two games with a knee injury.
Without Rogers in the mix, the Aggies have lost back-to-back games to Vanderbilt (49-45) and No. 13 LSU (81-56). Without the Oregon graduate transfer in those contests, the scoring output has been noticeably below Texas A&M’s season average of 69.5 points.
“We’re day-to-day,” Texas A&M coach Joni Taylor said of Rogers’ status following the LSU loss. “She is going to be out for some time. It’s not season-ending, but she won’t be back anytime soon.”
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Arkansas freshman guard Taliah Scott, who is 10th in the nation with 22.1 points per game, returned home to Orange Park, Fla., due to an undisclosed “serious family emergency.” Scott missed Arkansas’ 75-68 win over Missouri on Sunday.
Neighbors said the timetable on a return for Scott will be day-to-day and requested for “everybody to continue to keep her in your thoughts.” He said the Razorbacks “will operate as if she’s not going to be here until we know that she is.”
Arkansas has an opportunity to win consecutive SEC games for the second time this season, while Texas A&M has yet to lose three in a row.
The Aggies present issues for the Razorbacks with their defense and rebounding.
Texas A&M ranks second in the SEC holding opponents to 36.1% shooting while Arkansas is last in the league with a 38.4% field goal percentage. The Aggies are third in the league with a 10.48 rebounding margin. In contrast, the Razorbacks are 13th with a -3.26 margin.
Arkansas is 1-6 in conference play when it has been out-rebounded.
“They can disrupt you on the perimeter knowing that there’s somebody back there around the basket to change your shots, if not block them,” said Neighbors, who later credited the Aggies’ style to the identity of Taylor-coached teams. “And then they rebound it really well. You don’t get a lot of second opportunities. They do it without fouling.
“It will be important for us to be aggressive but also have some wisdom about where our shots come and when they come.”
