Texas hosts South Carolina in favorable stretch of SEC play

At the midway point of SEC play, the Texas Longhorns are firmly on the NCAA Tournament bubble as the last team in the field of Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology after opening a winnable stretch of games with Saturday’s 10-point victory over the Oklahoma Sooners in Norman prior to hosting the South Carolina Gamecocks at the Moody Center on Tuesday.

Next Saturday, disgraced former head coach Chris Beard brings his scuffling Ole Miss team to the Forty Acres, followed by a road game against Missouri and a home matchup against LSU. A win probability of 50 percent for the game in Columbia the lowest of that stretch for the Longhorns, creating an imperative for first-year head coach Sean Miller’s team to at least protect home court at the Moody Center.

Even a win on Tuesday would represent just the second time in conference play that Texas has won back-to-back games and the only winning streak longer than that came early in the season when the Longhorns notched four straight games against some of the worst teams in the country.

But since the 14-point loss to Tennessee in Knoxville in which Texas struggled to compete, Miller’s team has had chances to win every other game, including in hostile environments like Rupp Arena in Lexington and Neville Arena in Auburn.

After taking an eight-point lead into halftime against the Tigers, however, the game got away from the Longhorns in the second half because Texas committed 18 fouls that led to 28 free-throw attempts for Auburn.

“Not a lot else changed, but what really changed is their free-throw attempts,” Miller said in an appearance on On Texas Football. “It’s not eight fouls that we’re trying to get rid of, it’s the two, three, or four undisciplined fouls that we can correct, that we are working hard to correct.”

Those several undisciplined fouls add up quickly in close games — in the four SEC loses outside of the poor effort against the Volunteers, the Longhorns have lost by an average of 4.5 points.

“That’s four…

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Publish date : 2026-02-03 18:30:00

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