Line: Texas -21.5, O/U 139.5

No. 8 Texas basketball (3-1) finishes up the Abe Lemons Classic tonight against 5-0 Cal Baptist.

The Lancers have only been playing D1 basketball since 2018, but have been remarkably successful in their infancy in the Western Athletic Conference, having a winning record every season, including going 21-10 in their second. Rick Croy has been there from the beginning and has done a really good job, with an all-time record of 55-35.

Cal Baptist has two games in common with Texas already on their schedule, beating San Jose State 67-66 and Northern Colorado 74-70. They also beat San Francisco State 87-65, Mississippi Valley 95-66, and Jackson State 77-64 to give them an undefeated record heading into Wednesday night's matchup.

Cal Baptist's starting lineup looks like this.

They run an eight-man rotation essentially, and start four guards, so they like to play small. Their best player is Taran Armstrong, who can score and is an impressive passer.

Here's Texas' starting lineup.

The issue for Texas so far has been guard play. They're getting below-average play from Jones (though he did score a season-high 14 on Saturday against SJSU). Marcus Carr had his worst game of the year against the Spartans, going 1/7 for two points, four assists, four turnovers and four fouls in 22 minutes. To be frank, that's not going to get it done.

Texas needs Carr to bounce back before conference play starts if Texas has any chance at taking down Baylor or Kansas (or Tech, for that matter). Jones responded to not being started by scoring the most points he has in a game this season - we'll see if this performance can inspire Carr to get out of his head and start playing in the flow of the offense. He doesn't need to be scoring in the high teens like he did at Minnesota, but he should probably be in the double digits, at the least.

His passing numbers haven't been stellar either, as he leads the team in turnovers (of course this is partially due to his usage percentage and just the role of being a point guard but still - not great). He also leads the team in assists, but his ratio is unimpressive; it's just shy of 2:1.

All of this being said, Texas should roll tonight. Cal Baptist has done well in their pre-conference play, but struggled to beat two teams that Texas blew out. Texas' defense, which is ranked 22nd in the nation in scoring at 57 PPG allowed, will be able to stifle the Cal Baptist offense, despite a combined 30.8 PPG from the Lancers' top two scorers.

They've been forcing turnovers and bad shots, as well as doing a better job protecting the paint despite all of the criticisms of their lacking post play (though tonight, I'd like to see some more blocked shots down low, as they haven't done much of that this year; 2.3 per game, which is 284th in the nation. Disu will help with this upon his return).

Disu should be back in the next couple of weeks. He'll most likely be on a minutes restriction when he returns, so he may not be the immediate impact that people are hoping for, but when he does get it going again, this team will improve a lot.

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KeenanWomack_OB