Tonight’s update comes from Wichita, Kansas, where the road ahead does not look friendly. Denver is under a “snow and blowing snow advisory” and should be covered with four to eight inches of fresh snow by the time we arrive tomorrow afternoon. The forecast looks good for Saturday, so we shouldn’t be stuck in the city afterwards. Unless, of course, the third blizzard in as many weeks decides to bitchslap the mile-high city.

I never put an open thread up for Denver suggestions, so if anybody happens to have any, feel free to drop them here. I’ll have a Texas-Arlington wrap for you shortly.

With conference play just days away, one might think that Texas could overlook UT-Arlington tonight and only win by, say…..20 points instead of thirty. But after last Thursday’s ugly win over Centenary, I have to think that Coach Barnes will have the team ready to completely mudhole the Mavericks.

UTA is having a rough season. Coming into the game with a 4-7 record, the Mavs were most recently beaten by the UT-Dallas Comets. Unfortunatly for UTA, the Comets are a Division III team.

The high point for the Mavs this season was taking TCU to double overtime before ultimately losing. I suppose you could make an argument for one of their four wins being the high point, but I think a 2OT loss to a real team is a little more prestigious than wins over UT-Pan American and Texas-Tyler…..which, coincidentally, I just learned is a college.

UT-Arlington plays with a pretty deep bench, allowing only one player to average over thirty minutes a game. That one man is junior guard Rodrick Epps, who averages nine points and four assists per game.

Their team appears to be pretty small, the second-straight opponent that Texas has faced with a….height deficiency. Once again, we can look for the Horns to dominate on the boards and convert that into a ton of second-chance points.

Hopefully we can build an early lead in this cupcake game and get our reserves the late, uninterrpted playing time we weren’t able to give them in the Centenary match-up. In short, look for Ian Mooney to play about 35 minutes in this one and score seventeen points. Or maybe just five minutes and one point.

Get out to the Erwin Center tonight if you’ve got a chance. There will be a ton of seats available, and if last week was any indication, saying the game is on FSN doesn’t actually guarantee you can see it Austin. See y’all at the drum.

If you look solely at the number, Kevin Durant had a great game for the Longhorns on Thursday night against Centenary. Not to take anything away from KD’s solid 21-point, seventeen-rebound performance, but the game was anything but great for Texas. After a gutsy win over Arkansas and a tough road loss to Tennessee, this was the proverbial letdown game. Fortunately, it came against a team without the talent to convert that letdown into an upset. Coach Rick Barnes did in fact earn his 200th victory on the 40 Acres, but it came in an ugly 76-66 win over the Centenary Gents.

Texas (9-3) trailed Centenary at the under-twelve TV timeout. But beside that “early” deficit, Texas was never in danger of losing to the Gents. They were, however, completely mailing it in. The crowd was flat, the team was flat, and the game was ugly. The Horns had sixteen turnovers to only seventeen assists, just five days after turning the ball over only three times in the first half against a pressuring Tennessee squad.

Barnes had a quick hook throughout the game, constantly pulling players who had screwed up to give them some advice on the sideline. And while it’s certainly nice to be able to do that against the crappy teams and disrupt the flow of the game without ever risking a loss, it definitely isn’t much fun to watch for the fans. For a statistical example of how much Coach was shuffling the lineups, just take a gander at the minutes played — Durant had the most with 31, while reserves Matt Hill and Craig Winder played fifteen and eleven.

If we’re looking for positives in this steaming pile of blandness, it appeared that D.J. Augustin was back to 100% after the cramps in Tennessee that hampered his drives to the basket. And the Horns dominated the glass as they should’ve against the much smaller Gents, logging a 45-30 advantage in the rebounding department. Harrison Smith saw a full five minutes of play in the game, which is great for a guy who hardly gets to see the floor.

Otherwise, I’d rather just forget about this one. Chalk up another win for the Horns in their quest for another 20-victory season. But let’s just move on to UT-Arlington and look forward to conference play on Saturday.

It feels a bit weird writing this a full week and a half after the Tennessee game and five days after the team sleepwalked through the Centenary matchup, but the loss last Saturday in Knoxville was actually a huge step for the program.

Sure, the Horns blew a second-half lead of seventeen points, invcluding an abortion of clock management with 1:35 to go and a seven point advantage. And the argument could be made that Texas actually took its biggest strides in the victory over LSU. But teams learn the most from losses, and I think that is why we’ll be looking back in March and pointing to this game as the turning point.

Despite the game being two days before Christmas, the Volunteer fans showed up en masse. And they were loud. Very, very loud. And while many of their fans apparently don’t know much about the game of basketball — most were booing and bitching about calls despite Texas having eight team fouls to their three at one point in the second-half — they were devoted and cheered with intense fervor. Coming out of halftime, with their team down fifteen, Thompson-Boling Arena sounded more like there were two seconds left in a tie game.

The Vols made a brief spurt to cut the lead to ten, but Texas pushed it back out to the aforementioned seventeen-point cushion. The second half saw a change in tempo and styles as the refs called a much tighter ballgame. Justin Mason fouled out, and KD picked up his fourth. D.J. Augustin cramped up, and Atchley joined Jay Mase on the bench with five fouls. But without two of our core players, two others seeing limited minutes, and a crowd that was living and dying on every play, Texas still found itself ahead by eight with 2:30 on the clock.

Then everything melted down. And I’ll only briefly touch on that. Yes, A.J. and Durant took ill-advised shots early in the possession and failed to milk the clock. But Coach Barnes does a great job at teaching the team how to handle itself in random late-game situations (see: the half-court pass, timeout, and three-pointer at Tech in 2003 or 2004.) I have no doubt that Coach rectified the situation immediately when the team returned to practice the day after Christmas.

But the main point in all of this is that if you ignore the meltdown in the final minutes, an extremely young Texas team held its own in a hostile road environment without many of its key players. J.D. Lewis — J.D. Freakin Lewis! — was relied on for key minutes, and actually provided. Dexter Pittman saw more playing time than anybody could have possibly guessed he’d see against Tennessee’s up-tempo game. Yet Texas was in a position to win.

This is going to be huge when the Horns have to play in places like Norman, Stillwater, College Station, and Lubbock. I’d add Lawrence to the mix, but nothing can truly prepare a player for what it’s like inside Allen Fieldhouse on gameday. And of course, I’m not sure if anybody can take down this year’s KU team on their own floor……..oh, wait. My apologies to Oral Roberts.

What Texas takes away from this is that they can play with anybody in any situation. And when you consider the schedule that followed/follows the Tennessee game, I think this is going to be a key stretch for the Horns. Thursday night they took out Centenary, and tonight will likely steamroll UTA. Their first conference road test is against lowly Colorado, and then they get both Mizzou and OU at home. While the Tigers are certainly capable of an upset at the Frank Erwin Center — and OU could be as well, if a “perfect storm” of variables come together — this is a chance for Texas to rip off five wins in a row before their brutal OSU-Villanova-Nebraksa road stretch over an eight day period. Win two of those three, and Texas will be riding high as they head into the crunch time of February.

So, sure — you can be frustrated over the loss to the Vols. I know I definitely was, although that passed after ten or fifteen minutes. But give it just a few more weeks, and we’ll be talking about how this game was truly a sign of things to come….if you just ignore that little mark in the loss column.

TV: Fox Sports Southwest (TX only), 7 PM
Internet radio: SportsJuice.com

At Christmas, you find yourself eating a lot of food that you really know you shouldn’t be. You’re already beyond full, stuffed with turkey or ham and that delicious green bean casserole. You know there’s no possible enjoyment or benefit coming from trying to squeeze in just one more fudge square. But it’s just sitting there on the plate, and you find that you can’t stop grazing while Uncle Ernie is telling another story about seeing Wayne Newton live in Las Vegas.

And unforunately, that uncomfortably-full mindless gorging reminds me a lot of the game tonight between Texas and Centenary. There’s no lasting benefit that comes out of it — besides the brief moment where it tastes ohsogood — and it’s seems that it’s only there to give us a brief distraction from our annoying relatives. (Sorry, Uncle Ernie.)

Tonight’s game against Centenary isn’t going to provide much in the way of drama or intrigue, but it will give Rick Barnes a fairly strong chance at his 200th victory with the University of Texas. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that by the end of the night, Barnes will have reached the double-century mark. I’m a risk taker, I know.

The Centenary Gentlemen (5-7) are from a private school in Shreveport and play in the Mid-Continent Conference, where they face such challenging opponents as Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis — that’s IUPUI for you acronym-lovers — and Oral Roberts. Their RPI is currently 237 according to Ken Pomeroy’s RPI approximations so we will certainly see a slide in our SOS. Of course, when we play Alcorn State to start the year, everybody else looks tougher by association.

It appears that the Gents run pretty deep on their bench, with eight players seeing significant minutes and freshman forward Jeff Montague chipping in another eleven a game. Their leading scorer is guard Tyrone Hamilton, who is averaging just over 15 points per game. Centenary also looks like a pretty small team on paper, so I can only assume that we are going to see a strong rebounding advantage for the Horns.

Centenary, like Texas State, has already surpassed their win total for the 2005-06 season. The Gents only have five wins, but that still is an improvement over their 4-23 mark of a year ago. Coincidentally enough, Centenary and Texas State will play on Saturday in a rematch of the 91-85 Gents win back in November.

Honestly, this game is going to be pretty boring. But hopefully the two hours in the Erwin Center will give me enough time to figure out how in the hell to pronounce the name. Is it CEN-te-nary? Or perhaps cen-TEN-ary? These are the great philosophical questions that keep me up late at night.

For the Horns, it’s really just a chance to see how the team is looking heading into the new year and conference play. Is D.J. Augustin back at 100% after gutting through second-half cramps in Tennessee on Saturday? Will J.D. Lewis see increased playing time after his strong showing in Knoxville? And can Dexter Pittman get a double-double in less than 10 minutes of playing time?

I’d like to see Damion James take it to the rack a lot more tonight, so we can get a look at whether or not his inside touch is back. He’s thrown down his share of dunks lately, but his layups and pull-up jumpers are still a bit off. And what better time to work on a punishing inside game than against a team with the pushover nickname of “Gents”?

If you’re in town, swing by the FEC and fill in the abundance of empty seats we’ll have downstairs. Otherwise, you can catch the game in Texas on FSN, on the Longhorn Radio Network, or through the Centenary broadcast online at SportsJuice.com.