Can Texas fix its leaky defense in time for UConn? Sean Miller keeps sounding the alarm as fouls, rotations and a freshman wild card raise big questions.
The scoreboard said bounce-back. The tone from Sean Miller said something very different.
Texas cruised past Southern 95-69 at the Moody Center, responding to last week's ugly 88-69 loss to Virginia with the kind of offensive outburst fans wanted to see.
But if you expected a softened Miller in the postgame, you didn’t get him. Instead, the first-year Texas head coach doubled down on his criticism of the Longhorns' defense and discipline.
"Look, we have problems on defense," Miller said. "Unless we get better, unless me, us as a staff, solve some of these problems, we're not going to be good enough. … Man, it's not good."
So how much can you really take away from a 26-point win?
Texas is currently allowing 73.7 points per game, the sixth-most in the SEC. For a program trying to build an identity in Year 1 of the Miller era, that number sticks out. The Longhorns are scoring plenty, but are they anywhere close to the kind of defensive ceiling Miller has been known for elsewhere?
The fouling numbers concern him just as much as the blown assignments.
"Our fouling is not a thing of aggression. It’s a sign of weakness," Miller said. "Fouling negates effort, negates hustle. … We have to play defense without fouling. It’s a major problem."
If the effort is there but the habits aren’t, what changes next? That's where Miller hinted at something more drastic than just film sessions and extra shell drills. Rotations may be on the table.
"In addition to just working at it, we might have to make some changes, which includes playing players who play better defense and maybe some guys that aren’t playing defense as much," he said. "I don't think it's clear cut where every game you have the same answer, or else we would have just done that."
One intriguing piece of the puzzle is true freshman forward Declan Duru Jr.
His stats don’t pop yet, 1.9 points and 1.4 rebounds in eight minutes per game with four steals on the year, but Miller clearly sees defensive upside there. "Getting him more minutes could make us bigger, tougher, more pressure defensively," he said.
Will that be enough, and how fast can it happen?
With No. 5 UConn looming Friday in Hartford, Texas probably won't have all the answers. But Miller has made one thing crystal clear ... if this team is going anywhere in March, the real turnaround has to start on the defensive end, and it has to start soon.