The Texas Longhorns return to action at the Erwin Center tonight after a tough weekend in New Jersey. Despite holding second-half leads of eight and 18 at the IZOD Center, Texas stumbled down the stretch against both Oregon State and N.C. State, leaving East Rutherford with a pair of frustrating losses.

Fortunately, the Longhorns now have a pair of winnable games at the Erwin Center to rebuild their confidence before taking on UCLA next weekend. The team opens its short homestand tonight against Sam Houston State, a school that is winless in its four Division I games this season.

By the numbers

No matter how you slice it, the numbers aren’t pretty this year for Coach Jason Hooten and the Bearkats. According to stats guru Ken Pomeroy, Sam Houston State’s adjusted offensive efficiency is one of the 30 worst in all of Division I hoops.

The reasons behind the team’s struggle to put the ball in the basket are numerous. The Bearkats turn it over on 26.7% of their possessions, and are 32nd-worst in the nation when it comes to getting to the free-throw line. For a Texas team that sent Oregon State and N.C. State to the free throw line repeatedly in New Jersey, this statistic is a welcome one.

Sam Houston State is also struggling from long range, where they have made just 22.9% of their threes, the 14th-worst mark in Divison I. The Longhorns experimented with zone defense when they ran into foul trouble in New Jersey, and there’s no doubt that a team struggling this much from long range provides the perfect opportunity for the Horns to work on their zone at game speeds.

The three-point line has also been unkind to Sam Houston State on the defensive end. The Bearkats have faced four D-I opponents so far, and those teams knocked down more than 41% of their looks from behind the arc. Marksmen J’Covan Brown and Julien Lewis should be licking their chops.

Meet the Bearkats

To say that Sam Houston State is rebuilding this season would probably be a tad bit generous. The Bearkats lost four starters from last year’s team and return just three scholarship players. On a team filled with freshmen and junior college transfers, the returning players have accounted for just 23.3% of the team’s minutes so far this year.

The already-thin lineup took a major hit when Antuan Bootle, the team’s lone returning starter, was sidelined by a broken foot during the first week of the season and will be out of action for at least another four weeks. Last season, he led all Bearkat scorers when they faced Texas, just missing a double-double with his 16-point, nine-rebound line.

Big man Steven Werner will also likely miss tonight’s game after injuring his foot on Monday against Mercer. Werner was the team’s second-leading rebounder, averaging 6.7 boards per game. He was also third on the team in scoring, chalking up an average of 8.7 points.

While injuries have forced the Bearkats to get creative with the lineup, the team has received steady leadership from newcomer Konner Tucker. A transfer who played six games for Wake Forest, Tucker was also a juco stud at Lon Morris in Jacksonville, Texas. Averaging 34 minutes per game so far, Tucker leads the team with just under 11 points per game. Although the junior guard is “sneaky quick” in the words of his head coach, his paltry 22% success rate behind the arc means that opposing defenses can sag off and make it tougher for Tucker to blow by them.

The player most impacted by the injury shuffle is senior Marcus James, who has had to slide from the wing to the post in Werner’s absence. The 6’7″ Connecticut native had his own injury issues in the offseason, breaking a wrist playing pickup games back home. Fully healed, he’s now second on the team in scoring with 10.2 points per game and is averaging more than five rebounds.

At the point, junior Darius Gatson has stepped right into the role of floor leader. A juco transfer from Trinity Valley, the 5’11” guard is the only player on the team with more than 10 assists so far this season. Unfortunately, he has had some growing pains since jumping to D-I basketball, shooting less than 30% from the field while turning it over 13 times.

The Bearkats are also getting some immediate contributions from freshman Michael Holyfield and sophomore transfer Demarcus Gatlin. Out of New Mexico, Holyfield checks in at 6’11” and is unsurprisingly the team’s best rebounder, grabbing more than seven per game. Gatlin, who played his first season at Navarro, has started all five games and is averaging more than 27 minutes. He’s still working to find his footing, though, as he’s shooting just 24% from the field — 11% from behind the arc — and has 17 turnovers.

Off the bench, 6’9″ Aaron Thompson is chipping in valuable frontcourt minutes. One of the three returning scholarship players for Coach Hooten, Thompson is averaging more than 17 minutes per game but has scored only 14 points to date. Against Texas last season, the big man hardly saw the floor, logging just a turnover and rebound in his two minutes of action.

Coach Hooten also has a pair of backcourt reserves in Aaron Harwell and walk-on Marquel McKinney. Both have come off the bench in all five games, combining to average 2.9 points in roughly 25 minutes per game. Harwell arrives in Huntsville from Centenary College in Louisiana, a school that just transitioned from Division I to Division III, allowing the sophomore to be immediately eligible for Sam Houston State.

Keys to the game

Although Texas is going to have its struggles this season, there’s simply no reason why the Horns should lose this game. Instead, tonight’s match-up provides good opportunity to work on the issues that cropped up in New Jersey and get the team ready for big tests in the coming weeks from UCLA, Temple, and North Carolina. With that in mind, here are three things we’ll be watching.

1) How does J’Covan Brown respond? – Brown’s exit from the Legends Classic was an abrupt and unceremonious one, as his personal foul and nearly-immediate technical foul were the catalysts for a Texas meltdown against N.C. State. Before that, he was dominant, scoring 17 points while, in the words of Wolfpack coach Mark Gottfried, “slic[ing] us up like a side of fries.”

The words from Coach Barnes in the post-game presser weren’t that kind to Brown. He questioned the junior guard’s maturity and put him on notice in a very public setting. Against an overmatched Sam Houston State squad, Brown will need to pick up where he left off and also show poise when he feels foul calls are unwarranted.

2) Can Myck Kabongo regroup? – With Brown out of the game against the Wolfpack, it looked like Kabongo had suddenly misplaced his superhero cape. While Myck has struggled all season with finishing at the rim, he was suddenly unable to create any offense with the dribble and the Longhorns stalled out. Not only will we be watching to see how Kabongo looks with Brown back on the floor, but we’ll also be keeping an eye on how the offense works when the reigns are solely his to hold.

3) Can the Longhorns play defense without fouling? – As mentioned previously, the Bearkats are a perfect matchup for a Texas team that piled up the fouls in New Jersey. Rick Barnes is always a defense-first coach, and there’s no doubt he’s frustrated with his team’s inability to stop its opponents so far this year. Against a struggling Bearkat team, can Texas get back to the kind of defensive dominance it showed against Boston U in the season opener?