OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS I'LL PREVIEW OUR SIX TOUGHEST PRESEASON GAMES. THIS WEEK WE'LL START WITH THE LONGHORNS!!

I know everyone was anxious to see the new 2021/2022 preseason schedule! AND WHAT A PRESEASON IT IS!! I could almost see Tara's smile as she looked at the new schedule for the first time. We start with a small Division III school with 662 students that has been very successful for years playing schools their size.  

We end up before Christmas with the #1 ranked South Carolina Gamecocks in Columbia, in front of 18,000 raucous fans in Colonial Life Arena. These are the same Gamecock fans who lay awake nights re-living that NCAA Tournament semi-final game. The same Gamecock fans and players who are dead set on avenging that one point loss we inflicted on them in the Final Four. 

Our preseason amounts to about as wide a spread in size, talent, and motivation as is humanly possible between early November and late December. The exhibition game on November 6 will be with Clarke University from Dubuque, Iowa. Then we welcome Morgan State University from Baltimore, which you could safely say is a non-major, but is ten times the size of the Clarkies.

Then the Longhorns get driven right down Palm Drive into Maples.    

This will be Vic Schaefer's second season at the helm in Austin and he has every intention of re-installing the Longhorns as a permanent fixture in the highest echelon  of women's basketball. From today until November 14th - he, his assistants, and his players will be devoting themselves to laying out a fool-proof game plan for beating the Stanford Cardinal. Can you imagine what a blockbuster win that would be for the resurgent Longhorns? 

In the NCAA Tournament, Vic and his sixth-seeded kids took down the mighty second-seeded Maryland Terrapins when many media types and pundits were predicting that Maryland - the nation's highest scoring team - would just roll right through everyone and win the whole thing. How, you might ask, did Texas do it?

Defense, my friend, with a capital "D". Maryland didn't score their usual 93 points - they were lucky to score 61 and they lost by three. Also, the Longhorns used every second they could of every shot clock, then went all out to get offensive rebounds so they could take another thirty or more seconds off the shot clock. Maryland got sick and tired of playing defense. 

The Maryland team T-shirts flashed their season motto at everyone, "ALL GAS - NO BRAKES!!  After making the Turtles play what seemed like endless defense on every possession - Vic took away their fast break points. He had his players totally focused on breaking the press with careful sure passes, with precious few live ball turnovers, allowed almost no steals, and very few careless ball-handling turnovers. They played the slowest dullest most careful basketball they could muster. And it worked.

So, what will he cook up against us. When he was the defensive coordinator at A&M in 2011, they had the most lethal full court press I've seen and beat us in the Final Four, before beating Notre Dame for the national championship. Our ball-handling was our weak spot that season and they were all over it.

The 2021/2022 Texas team actually has some large holes to fill. Charlie Collier (leading scorer, 6'-5" number one WNBA draft pick), Celeste Taylor (second leading scorer, team leader), and Kyra Lambert (veteran point guard) will be replaced by Junior 6'-4" Post Lauren Ebo; Audrey Warren, Junior Guard, great effort player; and Joanne Allen-Taylor, their new point guard.  

Our third game of the season will need to be our soundest most error-free game of the preseason and we'll be fine. Whoever we put at point guard will be the key, in concert with our other strong ball-handlers. We'll need to keep our turnovers in single digits.

LET'S GO STANFORD!! CORRAL THE HORNS!!