Texas preparing to face either Virginia or Colorado State to open NCAA Tournament

AUSTIN, Texas — The excitement of the Texas Longhorns upon earning a No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament on Selection Sunday quickly turned towards senior forward Kadin Shedrick when the Virginia Cavaliers were paired with the Longhorns as one of the No. 10 seeds facing a First Four play-in game on Tuesday.

Shedrick, in his first year at Texas, spent his first three college seasons under head coach Tony Bennett in Charlottesville, setting up a potential matchup with his old team if Virginia advances on Tuesday by beating the Colorado State Rams in Dayton at 8:10 p.m. Central on truTV.

Might Shedrick be in charge of preparing that scouting report as the Longhorns staff gets ready for both teams ahead of Thursday’s first-round game in Charlotte on TNT at 5:50 p.m. Central?

“He’s very familiar with those guys,” laughed Texas head coach Rodney Terry.

Facing a play-in team is a first for Texas in the NCAA Tournament that departed the Big 12 Tournament early and projected as a No. 8 or No. 9 seed by most bracketologists, allowing Terry’s team to escape a potential second-round matchup against a No. 1 seed and set up the possibility of an intriguing contest with former head coach Rick Barnes and No. 2 seed Tennessee.

Barnes left the Forty Acres following a string of disappointing early exists from the Big Dance, a continuing trend in Knoxville in three of the five tournaments since Barnes took over in addition to a Sweet 16 upset by No. 13 seed Purdue as a No. 2 seed in 2019.

With 16 years of experience coaching teams in the NCAA Tournament as an assistant and a head coach, Terry isn’t looking ahead to the Round of 32 and that likely looming matchup with Barnes, who hired him away from UNC-Wilmington in 2002, the start of Terry’s 10-year stint at Texas that included runs to the Final Four in 2003 and the Elite Eight in 2006 and 2008.

“The first game is always the hardest game,” said Terry. “If you don’t win the first game, there is no second game. So you’ve got to put everything you have into game number one and if you’re fortunate and blessed to get to the next game, you’ll deal with that one then.”

For now, Texas is starting to hone in on the details of both potential opponents, teams that Terry called well coached and successful this season. Foregoing plans to have a watch party for Tuesday’s game — they’ve already had their watch party, Terry said — the Horns will instead have an intense, competitive practice before backing off on Wednesday.

And although Virginia is arguably the worst at-large team in the NCAA Tournament field with an adjusted efficiency rating of No. 69 by KenPom.com and a NET ranking of No. 54 thanks to a 2-7 record against Quad 1 opponents, Bennett’s team does present a consistent challenge.

In addition to a transition defense that Terry termed elite, what always makes the Cavaliers dangerous, even in a down year, is Bennett’s signature pack-line defense, a philosophy directly opposed to the no-middle defense that Chris Beard popularized at Texas Tech — the pack line uses hard hedges on ball screens and asks on-ball defenders to force opponents into the middle and away from the baseline with off-ball defenders staying inside the so-called pack line, an arc one step in from the three-point line roughly 16 or 17 feet from the basket, to help take away dribble drives without having to recover to three-point shooters.

Even this year’s comparatively mediocre Virginia team executes defensively at a high rate, ranking fifth in adjusted efficiency, allowing opponents to shoot just 30.4 percent from three, 17th nationally, posting the fourth-best block rate in the country, and allowing a free-throw rate of 25.7 percent that ranks 22nd.

The elite defense combined with a regressive offensive mindset produces laborious basketball at an adjusted tempo that ranks as the slowest in the country. Bennett’s teams never play aesthetically-pleasing basketball, but this year’s group is outright bad beyond limiting ambition to the extent that turnovers are virtually non-existent — declining to attack the offensive glass, ranking among the worst teams in the country at getting to the line free-throw line and converting on those rare opportunities, and generally bricking shots inside the arc. The Cavaliers do shoot well from three-point range, ranking 47th at 36.3 percent, but also take them at the 293rd rate in the country because Tony Bennett.

Gross.

The Rams are a two-point favorite, according to DraftKings, with a 55-percent win probability from BartTorvik.com thanks to a more balanced statistical profile that includes a NET ranking of No. 36 on the strength of six Quad 1 wins and the No. 49 offense and No. 40 defense in adjusted efficiency.

In the Mountain West Tournament, Colorado State made it to the semifinals before falling to New Mexico, the eventual champions. During non-conference play, CSU notched a 21-point win over then-No. 8 Creighton, the program’s first win over an AP top-10 opponent in almost 40 years, in addition to conference home victories over San Diego State and New Mexico.

The Mountain West may be a mid-major league, but the top of the conference is high-major quality and the Rams slot just outside that grouping.

Terry is familiar with the engine of the Colorado State offense, senior point guard Isaiah Stewart, an Allen product who received an offer from Terry’s staff at UTEP as a member of the 2019 class and emerged as one of the Mountain West’s best players over the last several seasons, averaging 16.5 points and 7.0 assists per game this year while shooting 44.7 percent from three on a relatively modest 4.1 attempts per game.

Despite the solid adjusted efficiency on defense, Colorado State trends offensively in the raw percentages, ranking second in assist rate led by the playmaking ability of Stevens and shooting well from two-point range and at the free-throw line while relying on the fifth-year senior’s decision making to avoid turnovers.

So the matchup between the Rams and Cavaliers rates as an intriguing strength-on-strength contest even if the Texas team doesn’t plan on congregating together to view the outcome on Tuesday.