No. 11 Texas hosts Sam Houston State on Wednesday

Following the first postponement of the 2020-21 Texas Longhorns basketball season, the No. 11 Horns — ranked more highly than at any other time in the Shaka Smart era — will host the Sam Houston State Bearkats on Wednesday at the Erwin Center in another non-conference matchup.

Sunday’s game against No. 2 Baylor, the Big 12 opener for both teams, was postponed after the Bears shut down all basketball activities on Saturday.

Jason Hooten’s Sam Houston State squad enters the game at 3-4 on the season with losses to SMU, Texas Tech, Boise State, and LSU. None of those games were close — the Bearkats rank No. 307 nationally in KenPom.com’s adjusted efficiency metric.

This is a team that is bad on offense and worse on defense. So is there anything else worth saying about Sam Houston State? No, there’s not.

Consequently, there aren’t a lot of new topics to discuss since last Wednesday’s win over Texas State, either. Redshirt sophomore guard Brock Cunningham suffered a chest contusion against the Bobcats that limited him to only five minutes. Senior guard Jase Febres still isn’t fully cleared to practice after his microfracture surgery, but Febres has told Smart that he’s feeling better every day.

In player trends, junior guard Courtney Ramey leads the team in scoring at 14.7 points per game. After struggling with his shooting from distance last year, he’s currently converting 40 percent from three-point range, as well as 87 percent from the free-throw line.

Freshman forward Greg Brown III is also coming off his career-best performance with 18 points in 22 minutes, including three made three-pointers, a critical hot streak for a young player who started out ice cold from deep. Brown blocked three shots as well.

The game tips off at 7 p.m. Central on Wednesday on Longhorn Network in a series that the Longhorns lead 14-2 without a loss since 1950. Texas has a 99-percent win probability with a predicted score of 85-57.