The Horns lost to Kansas State on Saturday and it ended the 14-game home-court winning streak.
The tendency is to sound the alarm over a loss like this. Though not happy, Longhorns coach Rick Barnes pointed out that North Carolina recently lost at home to Boston College and Michigan State did the same to Northwestern.
"You don’t have a God-given right to win at home," he said.
Barnes also contended that at least individually his team has improved since December, when it knocked off teams like UCLA and Villanova.
"It’s a disappointing loss, a hard loss, a tough loss, a bad loss," Barnes said. "Anyway you want to put it."
K-State guard Denis Clemente scored 44 points in Kansas State's 85-81 overtime.
After chasing Denis Clemente around the court, even trash talk was too tiring for Texas guard Justin Mason.
"He told me in the first half, 'I'm tired,'" Clemente recalled. "I look at him and say, 'What?' He said, 'I'm tired. You're pushing the ball too hard.'"
Texas players in El Paso for Saturday's Texas vs. The Nation All-Star Game are inundated with the same question from last season.
The question is an awkward one to ask to a Texas Longhorn senior football player.
Your team went 12-1. You won the program's third BCS bowl game in five years. You beat Oklahoma, Ohio State and Missouri. You and your classmates won more games than any other class in the long, storied history of the program.
But was this year a disappointment?
"It was a great season," said linebacker Rashad Bobino, one of three Longhorns playing in Saturday's Texas vs. The Nation All-Star Game. "The only disappointment was that we weren't in Miami (for the national title game) due to the BCS.
"It's a flawed system, and it needs to be corrected."
Basketball
Like father, like son. Texas Tech coach Pat Knight gets ejected from a game.
Pat Knight told reporters after the game to not "read too much into" his reaction.
"My job is to protect my players," he said. "If you all didn’t see what happened, then that’s your fault. Just see what happened. My job is to protect my players and you can only sit there and take so much. And so I got to protect my boys. That’s my job."
Asked if he just reached a breaking point after watching officials make other calls with which he disagreed, Knight declined to comment.
OU head coach Jeff Capel may have options. The Sooners may face some stiff competition for his services.
Speculation about Capel's future started before this season even tipped off. It's probably never really stopped since South Carolina realized Castiglione had discovered one of the nation's hottest young coaches a year earlier and made a run at Capel last March.
ESPN.com added the latest layer of speculation Friday. Writer Mark Schlabach, who is as well-connected as anyone in the business when it comes to Southeastern Conference sources, wrote that Capel is reportedly at the top of Georgia's wish list.
The Bulldogs' job opened Thursday when Dennis Felton was fired. Felton's dismissal came two days after another SEC coach, Mark Gottfried, resigned at Alabama.
Capel's name is even being mentioned at schools that still have a coach. Since the preseason, talk has centered on Capel being Maryland's No. 1 candidate if Gary Williams is fired.
Every game becomes more and more important to the Aggies if they want to see any post-season tournament play.
A 1-4 start to conference play is not what the Aggies were gunning for out of the gate, but the schedule-makers were not kind to the Aggies, who started with games against the five other teams predicted to finish in the upper division of the Big 12. Three of those games were on the road and two were at venues -- Texas and Kansas -- where the opponents boasted home winning streaks that rank among the top five in the nation.
A winning mark through the first five and the Aggies, picked fifth in the preseason poll, could have entertained ideas of competing for a Big 12 title. A 2-3 mark would have given the Aggies a game to play with when it comes to making the NCAA Tournament.
A&M, now 2-4, was unable to do either. That puts a little more weight on each remaining game.
Football
When the Big 12 was created in 1996, everyone knew it was just a matter of time before the recruiting talent in Texas would provide the base for a very strong conference.
After signing his first class of the Big 12 era, then-Texas A&M coach R.C. Slocum said: "With the Big 12, you can be as big-time as your team is good enough to be." Slocum said he saw "no reason" why South Division schools — the ones with the strongest ties to Texas’ schoolboy talent pool — could not regularly produce two top 10 teams every season.
"I think that is going to happen," Slocum said.
It happened for the first time in 2001 and has occurred five times in the past eight seasons, including 2007 and 2008.
Colorado Dan Hawkins does not disclose his list of recruits until after singing day.
Nebraska has rescinded its scholarship offer to linebacker Shawn Bodtmann.
Baylor continues to build a strong 2009 recruiting class.Houston Stratford defensive end Terrance Lloyd has switched his commitment from Missouri to the Bears. Head coach Art Biles is also tapping into the Canadian football talent. One big selling point is the weather in Texas.
Danny Watkins and Fredric Plesius are a long way from their Canadian roots, but they’re happy to be making a new home at Baylor.
They’re getting a chance to play American college football and earn a degree, a rare combination for any Canadian. It’s also pretty hard to beat the Texas weather in winter.
"I went home for Christmas, and it was 20 to 30 degrees below zero for a week," said Watkins, an offensive tackle. "So I get a kick when I hear people complain when it’s 40 degrees."
Forty walk-on candidates showed up to try out for the Nebraska football team.
It would seem not a great many things could make college kids rise when it’s dark and run sprints at 6 a.m. with odds so slanted against them.
But here were a collection of hopefuls willing to forgo a few hours of shut-eye at the chance, even if it was a slim one, to make the football team many of them had long called their favorite.
So goes it when the Nebraska football program offers a walk-on tryout for any interested full-time students.
Soner football close to a full house. That was the headline on this story about the 2009 recruiting class Sunday, February 1. You would think someone in Norman could spell the word Sooner...
Senator Orin Hatch from (where else?) Utah takes a stand against the BCS.
Another call for an investigation into the BCS college football ranking system. This time it was on the U.S. Senate floor, by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch.
Sen. Hatch said, "Mr. President, the BCS system is anti-competitive, unfair, and, in my opinion, un-American. I'm not just saying that because my team was not treated fairly. I think I’m making the case that a lot of teams aren't treated fairly. In no other sport in this country are champions selected by arbitrary and biased polls and computer ranking systems."
Ivan Maisel has the recruiting trail dos and don'ts. Mack Brown exemplifies his number 2.
2. Recruit intelligence. Recruit work ethic. Recruit character.
"He has to have the ability to start at Texas and win the Big 12 championship," Longhorn coach Mack Brown said. "Then you want a guy from a winning program. You want a guy from a family with values. We used to say with two parents. With families the way they are now, we say one really strong parent or two strong parents that don't live together. We'd look for him to have a 3.0 [grade-point average] in the core [classes]. We want a leader on the team and in the school and in the community. And look for him to be a captain."We've found in my 26 years that if you get the large majority of those values, he has a high-percentage chance to make it."
Some colleges are hiring outside recruiting services for game film, player evaluations and potential recruits' contact information.
An interesting look at five-star recruits vs. two-star recruits: The Sugar Bowl.
Some players give up their last semester of their Senior year to start college. It can pay off.
The chance to get on the field early can often outweigh that. Most coaches agree that the earlier a player arrives on campus, the better chance they have to play. But Texas coach Mack Brown said players have to be 100 percent committed to the decision for it to work.
"It doesn’t work unless it’s their decision," Brown said. "What we’ve found is that the ones that come early have a better chance to play in their first year. They can get acclimated to school when their schedule is a little less hectic and have the advantage of going through a spring and off-season program before the others get here. Since they have a opportunity to work with their coaches all spring, they get adjusted earlier and know what they need to work on in the summer."
When mascots go rogue. Rice's mascot, Sammy the Owl, was ejected from a basketball game.