New Reasons
JT Toppin is an absolute monster and is as relentless as kudzu. He completely demolished Drake in the paint with 25 points on 11-13 shooting with 13 rebounds.
Versatility to match up against anyone. Against UNC Wilmington they won by making 13 three pointers; against Drake they scored 50 of their 77 points in the paint.
I think it was William Faulkner who originally wrote “defense wins championships” in the midst of a rambling seven page long, unpunctuated sentence in the first chapter of his classic novel “The Sound and the Fury”. He certainly might have been thinking about Texas Tech’s bend but don’t break defensive strategy that forces the other team to work for every bucket or he might have been talking about the wheat harvest in Missouri in the late 40s…no one really knows.
Darrion Williams is a human wrecking ball, with the grace of a ballerina. He’s built out of tungsten and looks like an NFL tight-end but he also can light you up from outside and is an 84 percent free throw shooter.
They take care of the basketball. Not like they sing to it, rub its forehead lovingly or get it warm milk when it can’t sleep or anything creepy like that, but they had the 6th best assist-to-turnover ratio in the country during the regular season and have continued to play mostly mistake free basketball in the tournament.
Original Reasons
They’ve got that one special player who can put the whole thing on his back. JT Toppin has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year. The New Mexico transfer could be this tournament’s Danny Manning, as anyone who watched his 41 point, 15 rebound double OT performance against Arizona State earlier in the year can attest. He has some off-nights, but when he’s in rhythm, it’s hard to stop him.
Grant McCasland is extremely effective at controlling the tempo of the game. During his impressive tenure at North Texas and in his first two years at Texas Tech, McCasland's teams have shown the ability to play uptempo when necessary, but are able to slow things down to the basketball equivalent of a doom metal riff when it comes down to crunch time. They can play the sort of deliberate, “every possession is a matter of life or death” sort of basketball that has historically translated well in March.
I believe it was General William Tecumseh Sherman who first uttered the words “Defense wins championships”. It was a strange thing to say for a guy who was in the process of setting the entire state of Georgia on fire to say, but he had a point. And as always, Texas Tech plays a repressive, nasty style of defense that inflicts suffering and turnovers on all foes.
They can score. Texas Tech teams in past years have looked almost annoyed by the fact that they couldn’t just play defense for the entire game. KenPom ranks this year's squad in the top 10 in terms of offensive efficency.
Federiko Federiko is one of the best names in all of college basketball. Humans with the same first name as last name are rare, but if memory serves, Duany Duany from Syracuse was the first and only tautonymically named player ever to play for a National Championship. Folks with this sort of name are 1-0 in title games.
Keith Spillett