Texas Longhorns Basketball: Texas vs. Kansas Game Thread

The home stretch of the Big 12 season is here. Only five more regular season games remain, before the Longhorns -- and by extension the rest of us -- dive into the post season. Today's game is the toughest of those five.

The Kansas Jayhawks come into today's game in first place in the Big 12, with an 11-2 conference record. They don't appear ready to stumble on the way to yet another Big 12 championship.

However, if Texas does want to crack the door open towards a late charge at a share of the title with Kansas, the Longhorns could really use a win today. It could happen -- Ken Pomeroy's system gives Texas around a 20 percent chance of winning -- but for a win we will need to see a repeat of at least some of the good things that took place at the start of the month in Austin.

In that previous match-up, Cameron Ridley overpowered Joel Embiid. The Kansas center has lately been battling an injury, but he played 33 highly effective minutes against Texas Tech Tuesday night, so we can assume he is healthy enough to make trouble.

The last time these two teams met, Jonathan Holmes played what perhaps has been the best game of his college career, and Isaiah Taylor broke down the Kansas defense pretty much any time he wanted.

And in the earlier Texas-Kansas game, Demarcus Holland and the Texas D contained Andrew Wiggins, cutting off all avenues to the basket, turning him into a jump shooter.

Getting all that to happen again, and getting the required calls from the officials on the road, seems hard. And even if all those things do happen, Wayne Selden and Naadir Tharpe are both perfectly capable of hitting a bunch of threes and winning the game for Kansas on their own. This is why visiting teams seldom win in Lawrence; the Jayhawks are good.

But with all that Texas still has something like a 20 percent chance? That is one in five. That doesn't sound so bad, Mr. Pomeroy.

This is your game thread.