The Horned Frogs could feel the ground giving way under them. Their knees already wobbled from a three-game losing streak. Senior Night had been a bust. Then Friday, an assistant coach became part of the FBI’s college basketball investigation, creating more angst.
All around the TCU basketball team, disarray.
The confusion called for a moment, a beacon, a touchstone — something to slow the spinning.
Saturday, Desmond Bane picked the Frogs up from the rubble with a 34-point performance that restored order in their world. The junior guard’s performance led a thorough 69-56 victory at Texas that likely got his team back in the NCAA tournament.
With his 14-for-20 shooting (13-for-16 to start), six 3-pointers, six rebounds, two assists and a block, Bane delivered his best game, amid crisis.
“He’s a real leader,” coach Jamie Dixon said. “He played really well on both sides, offense and defense, and obviously the numbers show for the offense. For whatever reason, we just weren’t getting him good shots the last couple of games. But I think that had a lot to do with the defensive teams we were playing against and that we couldn’t get stops.”
Please, don’t remind Frogs Nation.
The last couple of games . . . uh, um . . . well, let’s just stop there. The problems are well-documented — four players vamoosed midseason, two more sidelined by injury, little to no five-on-five live practice, opponents raining 3-pointers, a season-low 52 points in the final home game . . . oops, we’re doing it again.
Let’s stick to Saturday.
The Frogs deserve a mountain of credit for getting off the mat, playing with purpose, winning a must-have game, on the road, with an attacking style on offense and persistent hustle on defense that brought back memories of December and January and perhaps purchased future memories of March.
As it stands now, the Frogs are more likely in the NCAA tournament than not, based on the work of prominent bracketologists. The selection committee factors in the conference tournaments, but not to a great degree. Most of the 68 entries are settled, spoken for by an entire season’s body of work in wins and losses, RPIs and NETs. A Cinderella or two must be accounted for in the room. But the work that remains is largely about seeding.
Not that Dixon or the Frogs care.
They’re eager to play another game, to again make a case for themselves, to simply enjoy the return to normalcy.
“You can make all the predictions you want about how the other tournaments play out and how we finish,” Dixon said. “We have every intention of winning our next game. Our league has done extraordinary things, so extraordinary things are probably going to happen to our league. But we have every intention of winning our next game.”
That’s Wednesday in Kansas City at the Big 12 tournament, a 6 p.m. game against Oklahoma State.
After that, is there a next game?
If things are back to normal, as Saturday in Austin seemed to indicate, why not?
“Good performance by all of them,” Dixon said. “It was a good team effort. We all defended well.”
That’s what he normally said about his team. Before their world started spinning.