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TRENDING FOR TEXAS TECH

Shooting Percentage | Last week we shot the ball good against North Carolina A&T and not so good against Florida A&M. Our percentages in those games were 48.5% and 39.2%. We rank #91 in field goal percentage out of the country at 45.4% which is decent, but the stat has been trending downward as the season has gone on. I expect that as Big 12 play opens up this stat will go down even more rather than go up. I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t bet that we will be seeing any more easy shots against our conference teams then we did in our non-conference games. One of the things that brings our field goal percentage down is our poor three point shooting percentage, NCAT (25%) and FAMU (21.4%). If you watch our games we get good buckets inside, but can’t hit our three point bombs. I think we may need to start taking a few less treys and try and get the drives and screens going on to take more inside shots. I know I love the three ball and how it creates open space down low, but if it isn’t dropping lets take a few less outside shots.

Steals | At 10.1 spg, Tech is still a top ten team in the nation in steals per game. The NCAT game we only had 7, but against FAMU we had 12. Steals are something that I get the feeling could be a stat that won’t ever fall off too much with our team keeping the same defense and pressing the way they do as Big 12 play begins. Steals lead to fast break points, and fast break points are a key to the up-tempo style ball playing. Steals and fast break points also always tend to get the crowd more enthusiastic and give a team momentum. As I have watched this team over the non-conference schedule I think all fans would agree we have a squad that has runs over the course of the game, we don’t play with a steady pace throughout the game. This is just Coach Walker’s controlled chaos style of play he is using, and I like it. We will see if it works in the Big 12 conference this season, it has for teams like our old conference partners Missouri in previous seasons.

Ty Nurse (Senior Guard) | Nurse is averaging 11.8 mpg, 1 ppg, 0.9 rpg, and 1.1 apg. He did well defensively 2 weeks ago in the Alabama game in which he played for 24 minutes. He was stealing some playing time away from Trency Jackson because he had a role in the large comeback that Tech was mounting in the 2nd half of that game. Since that time he has seen his minutes per game go up tremendously with ASU (12 minutes), NCAT (15), and FAMU (20). He had 4 assists in the NCAT game but other then that has had 2 points in three of those games combined on 1-6 shooting. While I like the way Nurse plays defensively, I am nervous about how much playing time he is getting lately. I know he is more experienced than most any other player on the team in a Tech uniform, but I still am apprehensive. This is probably because of his inability to run the point last season with a tendency to turn the ball over. Walker has shifted him to more of a shooting guard position and lets Josh Gray and Daylen Robinson handle the ball most of the game at the one-guard while Nurse is playing the two-position. It will be interesting to see if Nurse keeps getting more minutes in Big 12 games.

Turnovers | This is a stat that keeps getting worse and worse as the season goes along. I’m not going to go much into this stat right now, but just will probably track it most every week because it is so important to showing the progress of a teams improvement over the season. I get sick of writing each week about how much of an indication it is, and watching each game is frustrating at times with our team make silly plays that they should have learned from games ago. Last week against NCAT we had 15 turnovers, and against FAMU we had 21. That is miserably bad against the type of competition we were playing. We are now at 15.4 TOPG on the season and have become the #264 team in the country to turn the ball over (#8 in Big 12).

Winning Streak & Start of Big 12 Games| So we ended our 3 game losing skid, and finished up against two lower level teams getting wins that were much needed. Finsihing the non-conference with a 7-4 record is one more loss then I had planned on and wanted to have at this point, but it is still better than some people thought we would be. This team is young and inexperienced in the backcourt with a lack of depth in the frontcourt. But, if you watch these guys play it is a much more fun and entertaining brand of basketball then last season. We do have raw talent on this team, and we will get some wins in the Big 12 this season. We will probably take some poundings as well, but the neat thing about watching this team is they don’t give up in games and play until the final buzzer sounds. I hope we can get the Big 12 started right and whip TCU as this team goes on the road for the first time all season on Saturday. Wreck ‘em Tech!