Rodney Terry explains anger in UCF handshake line: Horns Down 'looks very classless'

UCF outlasted Texas 77-71 in the Moody Center on Wednesday night, overcoming a 16-point deficit to hand the Longhorns its second-straight loss.

In the postgame handshake line, Longhorns head coach Rodney Terry took exception to a few UCF players that celebrated the win with ‘Horns Down.’ He gave the Knights roster a piece of his mind, calling their actions classless while shaking their hands.

“We don’t do that because when you do those kinds of things, it looks very classless and it also looks like you would just hoping to win,” Terry said. We never go into games trying to hope to win. We go into games expecting to win. So we don’t act like that. We expect to win, we don’t jump up and down like we won a national championship.

“We don’t step on anyone’s home court deal in that crazy trying to show them up in any way. We don’t do that. So that’s what I was angry about.”

The Longhorns were out-rebounded by the Knights 37-22 — including 12 offensive boards compared the Texas’ four. UCF logged five blocks as a team, which helped the Big 12 newcomer outscore Texas 34-22 in the paint.

Following the finish, Texas drops to 1-3 in conference play, tied with West Virginia for the second-lowest mark in the Big 12. Oklahoma State, who is 0-4 thus far, are alone in last place. Meanwhile, UCF rides into the back half of January having logged its first Big 12 Conference wins against Kansas and Texas — all in one week.

For Texas, they’ve dropped three of their last four games and have their toughest conference test thus far with a home matchup against No. 9 Baylor on Saturday. The Bears are coming off a loss themselves to Kansas State in overtime on Tuesday — their first conference loss of the season.

Things won’t let up for the Longhorns from there, however. Including Baylor, the final four games of Texas’ January schedule will be against No. 15 Oklahoma and No. 20 BYU — both games are consecutive and on the road — before returning home on Jan. 29 to host No. 5 Houston.

As Texas looks to embrace the tough sledding ahead of them, the Longhorns will look to turn their fortunes around in the coming weeks. With no shortage of opportunities ahead of them, it’s back to the drawing board for Terry and company as they look to right their wrongs from the past two weeks.