Last week, Texas head coach Sean Miller was hot when discussing his team’s foul issues, describing it as a plague following their road loss to Kentucky.
The fouling plague returned on Wednesday night against the Auburn Tigers at Neville Arena in Auburn, Alabama. The Longhorns struggled to stay out of foul trouble, drawing 26 fouls, the majority coming in the second half with 18.
Four of the Longhorns’ starting five found themselves in foul trouble, with senior guard Jordan Pope fouling out in the waning seconds of the night when Miller implemented full court press to slow down the game for added possessions.
The Tigers banked 22-28 shots at the line, adding to their second-half push that ultimately decided the night. Auburn carved away from a 14-point deficit in the first half to top Texas, 88-82, in a must-win game for both teams on the bubble of the March Madness bracket.
The Longhorns cracked open the game with the hot hand on offense, shooting a collective 13-23 in the field with a commanding eight-point lead as both teams entered the locker room for halftime. But the Tigers, a team that lacked a cohesive identity on both sides of the ball, came out in the second with a vengeance.
Auburn opened up the second half with a new sense of purpose, limiting the Longhorns’ best shooters, junior guard Dailyn Swain, graduate forward Tramon Mark and Pope. Swain led Texas tonight in points with 30, his second-highest total of the season. Even so, he took until the 15:31 mark to make his first basket of the second half.
Outside of a late-game push by the Longhorns, shooting four consecutive field goals and back-to-back three pointers by junior forward Camden Heide, the Texas offense completely dried up in the second half.
Defensively, this was the same team that held the second-best offense in the country to 67 points last Saturday, but the same physical style of play that found success against the Georgia Bulldogs was seemingly penalized more tonight.
The 18 fouls on Texas gave Auburn 22 free points, a complete inverse of the story of the first half, when the Longhorns were fouled just eight times. In all, Auburn was able to go up to the line 39 times in tonight’s game, a season high for the Longhorns.
With the foul issues mounting, the Longhorns’ defense attempted to lay off but to no avail. Texas could not keep up with the Tigers’ second-half adjustments. Auburn went 13-19 in the second half, a massive change from the dismal 11-28 in the field in the first 20 minutes of the night.
The Longhorns’ offense, an already limited unit that has run an eight-man rotation the entire season, was able to see firsthand how dire a situation can become when one of the team’s best scorers doesn’t perform to the standard.
Mark, one of the consistent performers this season, especially in conference play, had an off day to say the least. The forward scored just four points in the contest and was benched for large portions of the second half due to fouling issues.
Texas will next face Oklahoma in a Red River Rivalry matchup at 1 p.m. CT at the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
