Tiny Little Xavier Beat the Texas Longhorns......Oh my!

[VarsityShop]

I cant believe that tiny little Xavier blasted the Texas Longhorns out of the NCAA Tourney in the Sweet 16!

They ejected the Texas Longhorn coach!

The undergrad enrollment at Xavier has got to be less than 6K!

Would Xavier's athletic budget be a 1/10 the size of the Horns?

Did a team called "the Musketeers" really beat the Texas Longhorns in the Sweet 16?......LOL

[ALEX LIFESON]

GO MOUSEKATEERS!!!

[ALEX LIFESON]

GO MOUSEKATEERS...

[Special_Delivery_Smu_Fans]

Kevin Blackistone in today's Dallas Morning News pretty much says the same thing...... that the University Of Texas has no excuse losing to a tiny school like Xavier.

UT, Barnes have no excuse

By Kevin Blackistone - Dallas Morning News
02:26 AM CST on Saturday, March 27, 2004


ATLANTA – Rick Barnes said his guys were giving it their all and he wanted to let them know he was going to stand up for them. He should've waited four seconds.

In the NCAA Tournament, anything can happen. It already had in Texas's Friday night tussle with Xavier's Musketeers. A youngster who'd missed but two of his last 43 free throws, Xavier's Romain Sato, finally clanked another one.

But down three points with four ticks left, Barnes, as mild-mannered a basketball coach as can be found in the heat of the moment, did something to inspire referee Ted Valentine's ire. After P.J. Tucker fouled Dedrick Finn, UT Coach Barnes was hit with two technical fouls and sent to the locker room.
Sato converted three of four technical free throws, and Finn made two more. The Musketeers advanced to the Elite Eight with a 79-71 win.

It wasn't likely that Finn would've missed both free throws. But stranger things have occurred in college basketball at this time of year. Had nerves gotten the best of Finn, the Longhorns would've had a chance for a miracle shot to send the game into overtime. They didn't.

A lot will be made of the officiating in what became the Longhorns' eighth and final loss of this season. The seventh-seeded Musketeers, a team that favors outside shooting, was awarded 35 free throws. The third-seeded Longhorns, a team that favors inside shooting, was awarded only 17 charity shots.

And as much as Barnes should've bitten his tongue until the final buzzer, Valentine should've swallowed his whistle. At that point in such a weighty game, assessing a technical was unnecessary.

Barnes said afterward that what happened at the end of the game shouldn't have. He was talking about Valentine. Valentine refused to comment.

Shoving that aside, however, which will be difficult to do for folks connected to the big university in Austin, what ultimately happened to the Longhorns on Friday was that they got beat by the other guys in shorts. And it never should've happened.
How do you want to cut it?

Rebounding? Texas was a strong rebounding team most of this season. Xavier, a smaller club, beat them to four more rebounds. Texas forward Brad Buckman managed one rebound in 16 minutes.

"I thought the big challenge in this game tonight was going to be rebounding," Xavier coach Thad Matta said, "and we did an excellent job on the boards."

Turnovers? All season long, the Longhorns somehow covered up for the ball-handling it lost when T.J. Ford opted for the NBA draft. It caught up with them against Xavier's pesky guards. They swiped the ball from the Longhorns a half-dozen times, almost all of which seemed to come at critical moments.
"The start of the second half," Barnes admitted, "we had a couple of turnovers that put us in a hole."

Inside scoring? Jason Klotz was the surprise contributor to the Longhorns as the season wore on. He failed to get off a shot in the first half Friday and then missed nine of 10 close-in attempts in the second half.

"We got good looks," Longhorns senior Royal Ivey said, "but the ball didn't fall for us."

Depth? The one hallmark of these Longhorns was that Barnes threw 10 or 11 guys into the fray every outing and eventually some combination stuck to the wood. He did the same against Xavier but got productive games only from a few players. Shooting guard Brandon Mouton scored 21 points before fouling out, P.J. Tucker put up 10 points and snatched a game-high 10 rebounds, and Brian Boddicker hit three 3-pointers in the second half. That was it, really.

Coaching? After being nearly flawless this season and appropriately complimentary of his senior class, Barnes never went back to post James Thomas after he picked up two fouls in two minutes. As much as Buckman and Klotz struggled, Thomas should've gotten another chance.

Defense? When the Longhorns jumped to an eight-point lead in the first half, they not only let Xavier back into the game in the blink of an eye, but they even surrendered the lead. Xavier went on a 10-nothing run. What was most troubling was that the Longhorns squandered shutting out Xavier's sharp-shooting Lionel Chalmers until just more than 4 ½ minutes were left in the opening half.

"We just didn't make the plays we needed to," Barnes summed up, "for whatever reasons."

That is the main reason the Longhorns season just ended.

E-mail kblackistone@dallasnews.com


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