FORT WORTH — There was a time when TCU and Texas Tech were the bottom teams in the Big 12. Three years straight, in fact.
It wasn’t so long ago, either. When the Horned Frogs joined the conference seven years ago, they started out finishing 10th, 10th and ninth. Tech was ninth, ninth and 10th.
The Red Raiders got out of the basement the next year, making The Dance in 2016. Unexpectedly, Tubby Smith checked out as coach. Tech responded by hiring Sun Belt champ Chris Beard of Little Rock.
The Frogs climbed into the daylight a year later under Jamie Dixon, going so far as to win the 2017 NIT.
Tech sat out postseason that year.
Last year, both teams went dancing.
This year, there’s a chance both can go again. The Red Raiders certainly will. And when they get there, you don’t have to be Carrie Ann Inaba to know there’s a great chance they stay at the party awhile.
Three years into the overlapping Beard and Dixon eras, Tech is farther down the road than TCU, as evidenced by a convincing season sweep completed Saturday with a no-doubt-about-it 81-66 victory in Fort Worth.
Tech has a great chance to win the league. TCU is far removed from its last-place days. Both programs have remade themselves from their days in everybody’s dust.
But the Red Raiders are putting distance between them and the Frogs, thanks to sharp recruiting, enviable depth and lock-down defense. Graduate transfers Matt Mooney and Tariq Owen combined Saturday for 23 points, 18 rebounds and eight assists. All eight Tech players who got in the game scored. And they allowed only 25 points in the first half to the home team.
The Frogs starters all played 34-plus minutes. The two players off the bench took four shots total, missed them all, and got two rebounds and six assists.
TCU and Tech escaped the basement together. But they’re not together.
“Clearly they execute better, they defend better. Offensively, they execute better,” Dixon said. “We’ve got work to do.”
TCU has the same plan as Tech — spread the scoring, shoot the 3-pointer and rebound. On defense, it’s man-to-man.
“It’s interesting because a lot of the concepts that they use, we have the same concepts,” Dixon said of the defensive plan. “They obviously have seniors, fifth-year guys, doing it and older guys that are much more physical than we are. We’ve known that. We’ve tried to stress that.”
In recruiting, same thing. Dixon wants to have an “old” team every year, a squad of players with multiple years of experience. To him, there’s a big advantage in having a 22- and 23-year-olds going against 18- and 19-year-olds. He compliments Tech for getting old and staying old under Beard, which the acquisitions of Mooney and Owens helped accomplish.
“They got the guys that everybody in the country was trying to recruit,” Dixon said. “Those two guys, everybody knew, were probably the best graduate-transfer guys out there, and they got them. And they fit in really well into their system.”
Saturday, the old and deep Raiders crashed on Schollmaier Arena like a wave.
“They came out and were real physical with us,” Frogs guard Alex Robinson said. “We hadn’t been able to go much live, so it kind of hit us in the mouth. We had to respond. Felt like we did a pretty good job in the second half. But just got ourselves in too big of a hole.”
TCU put Tech on the ropes to start the second half. But the Raiders kept the Frogs at arm’s length and got their legs back under them.
“They play so well together as a team, and they click in that motion, and that’s what really makes it difficult to guard,” Robinson said. “They’re just extremely disciplined. They do all the right things. They’re a real selfless team on the offensive and defensive end. That’s probably their best trait.”
Dixon is trying to position that trait into becoming a strength for TCU, as well. But he’s down to seven players.
Of course, Tech used only eight.
“That’s what I was trying to explain to our guys,” Dixon said. “We can’t use that as an excuse. That shouldn’t be as much to their advantage. But their eight really have a lot of experience between them and are just playing at a real high level.”
It’s a different level entirely for Tech, not just from its former basement neighbor, TCU. Right now, it’s from all of the Big 12.