After a slow start against Fairleigh Dickinson, falling behind 10-2 in the opening minutes of the game, Texas men’s basketball were in need of a spark to prevent falling too far behind in the opening minutes of the game.
The Longhorn that stepped up was graduate student guard Tramon Mark.
Receiving the ball from junior forward Dailyn Swain, Mark took a shot from the corner of the court, and despite being fouled, made the contested shot to give Texas an 11-10 lead.
While the moment came early in the game, with 14:50 still left on the clock in the first half, the shot was indicative of how the rest of the night would go for Mark — leading the scoresheet with 20 points en route to a 93-58 victory.
“(The shot) kept me aggressive,” Mark said. “I’m an aggressive player, so I just gotta keep doing what I’m doing. And my teammates set me up really well. I set them up too. We just gotta get better as a team and be ready.”
Mark’s 20 points came from a combination of three-pointers and difficult baskets in the paint. The graduate student went 9-13 from the field and 2-6 from beyond the arc. The guard typically found himself in the paint, floating the ball into the basket over the FDU defender. He accompanied his scoring performance with three defensive rebounds and two assists.
Despite Mark’s influence on the offensive end, he wasn’t the only high-scorer on the team as sophomore center Matas Vokietaitis put up 19 points in an efficient performance. The Lithuanian played 19 minutes, going a perfect 8-8 from the field. Defensively, he collected five rebounds and blocked one of FDU’s shots.
“(Mark and Vokietaitis) combined to be too much for FDU,” head coach Sean Miller said. “When you look at those two guys, what they did, Tramon was nine for 13 from the floor and Matas was eight for eight. That’s 17 for 21 from the field. That’s 39 points and high efficiency. I thought both of those guys on our end were really terrific and they ended up being the difference.”
However, despite the 93 points scored by the Longhorns, there were many points left unscored — shooting 19-34 from the free throw line and 6-23 from three-point range.
“Looking at 93 points for the game, if we could have been better in those two areas tonight, we would have pushed the 100-point mark,” Miller said. “We all would have taken that. Both of the teams that we played here at Moody have mixed in quite a bit of zone (defense). … That’s a good experience for us, but I think that sometimes our choppy play, we have to learn to be better in that area of recognizing and being a little bit smoother going against either of those defenses.”
The Longhorns will return to the Moody Center to take on Kansas City on Saturday. Tipoff is set for 12:00 p.m.
