Rodney Terry reveals how Texas turned things around against Kansas State

The Texas Longhorns secured their second straight victory over a Top 25-ranked opponent on Saturday defeating No. 7 Kansas State 69-66 on the road. The Longhorns were down 11 points at halftime, and were down as many as 14 points during the game, but played stellar in the second half that propelled them to victory, which interim head coach Rodney Terry spoke about following the win.

“Well really I thought we guarded pretty decent in the first half,” Terry said. “Again I thought the two areas, when we came in at halftime, there were three areas that we really needed to try to address and get better with.”

Texas struggled with turnovers in the first half, but played a much cleaner game on the offensive side of the ball in the second half thanks to some adjustments Terry made at halftime.

“We went right to the video with our turnovers, we had really bad turnovers in the first half and we knew coming into this ball game here that we could not turn the ball over,” Terry explained. “We need to value taking care of the ball, we knew we had to keep these guys off the glass and we gave them some second chance opportunities, so we saw the offensive rebounds as well.”

The Longhorns ended up winning the turnover battle Saturday, forcing some turnovers of their own in the process. The ended the night with 13 second-chance points and 19 points off of turnovers, taking a big leap in offensive efficiency in the second half.

“And then we needed to move better, we didn’t do a great job, we kind of stood around a lot in the first half. We didn’t have good cuts, again we missed some easy shots but we feel like we’re more efficient team than we showed in the first half,” Terry said.

Texas started off the second half with an impressive 14-4 run to cut the lead to just one point with 15:04 left in the game. They then leaned on a strong second half performance from senior forward Christian Bishop, who scored a season-high 14 points off of the bench after being held scoreless in the first half.

“And I thought in the second half we kind of settled in a little bit and we didn’t settle for some shots and we earned some baskets. We really wanted to try to get to the paint against these guys and we were able to get to the foul line I think 21 times, which was huge for us. I think we had 11 free throws at the half which was big for us,” Terry said.

The Longhorns are now 12-3 since Terry has taken over as interim head coach, as they’ll look to keep their ranked win streak going when they take on No. 8 Kansas on Monday in their next matchup.