Should be an interesting game, and one that begs for Texas to play a bigger line-up. St. Mary's attempts 24 3-pointers a game. Their starting lineup has three outside threats. If Texas starts man to man, James gets to cover a 6'7" guy who takes half of his shots behind the arc, and Abrams winds up on a guy who is 6'3". Their point guard is a freshman who leads the team in 3 pointers and minutes and scoring and steals. Johnson gets to wrestle with a similarly sized rebounding beast, Diamon Simpson. St. Mary's shoots well, but not extraordinarily so. Their strength seems to be more on the defensive side, holding opponents to 39.6% shooting, and only 27.5% on 3's. A certain degree of patience in the half-court is needed.
I think the opposite approach would work better. We should go with our Tennessee and UCLA lineup, press and run them out of the gym.
I expect we will see a lot of the three guard lineup, but I don't know if pressing and running St. Mary's out of the gym is a likely result. St. Mary's 2 primary ball handlers have combined to commit only 42 turnovers all year. That's 4 less than Augustin alone, and in about 180 more minutes on the court. They do seem turnover prone once you force the ball out of Mills and Golden's hands, so maybe we'll see a lot of effort to force the point guards to pass early. But my concern is similar to all those games last year in which we dreaded seeing a team that came here with tall outside shooters. I worry about having O'Leary and Golden having relatively easy looks.
