Saturday’s Lone Star Showdown at the Moody Center between the Texas Longhorns and the Texas A&M Aggies takes on a new look this year as first-year head coaches Sean Miller and Bucky McMillan face off for the first time in their tenures.
As Miller’s team begins to coalesce around a burgeoning identity that allowed the Longhorns to notch back-to-back wins over top-15 opponents for the first time in three years, McMillan’s Aggies bring “Bucky Ball” to the Forty Acres.
It’s a style of play that McMillan forged as a high school basketball coach in the suburbs of Birmingham, Ala. before making the short move and big leap to college at Samford, where McMillan won 99 games over five seasons and made an NCAA Tournament appearance in 2024.
Using a variety of full-court pressures after makes and misses, as well as zone and man looks in the halfcourt, Bucky Ball turns turnovers into fast-break opportunities hunting three-point shots — the Aggies rank 17th in opponent turnover rate, producing the No. 17 adjusted tempo in the country, the No. 12 assist rate, and the No. 28 three-point rate.
“I think that the number one thing is really just to acknowledge Texas A&M’s identity defensively — they rely on pressure, full-court pressure, they have great depth. They play nine and 10 players, game in, game out, and their full-court pressure has a wearing-down effect on your team,” Miller said on Friday.
“It also creates turnovers, and they do as good of a job as any team on our schedule of forcing turnovers, creating turnovers.”
In forcing 16.4 turnovers per game, A&M ranks 10th nationally in that category, which helps produce quick, quality looks that fuel the No. 26 offense in effective field-goal percentage and the No. 39 three-point shooting attack at 36.9 percent.
With 11 players averaging more than 11 minutes per game, the Aggies came at opponents in waves, but five of the six players who play the most minutes are guards — the other is 6’7 forward Rueben Agee — so A&M is an undersized team that could struggle to defend 7’0, 255-pound Texas sophomore center Matas Vokietaitis. The key for the Longhorns will be simply getting into the halfcourt situations to feed the post.
“Before we can even get to Matas or trying to establish an advantage, we have to be able to attack their pressure, make smart decisions, be able to play long stretches with not allowing them to turn us over, and I think if you do that, then you have a better chance of getting to your strengths, whatever they are,” Miller said.
Getting quality looks in the paint and getting to the free-throw line by playing through Vokietaitis are certainly strengths for this Texas team — the big Lithuanian is drawing about 10 fouls per game, consistently putting opposing frontcourts in foul trouble and regularly getting into the bonus, turning common fouls on his teammates into trips to the free-throw line. Fueled by Vokietaitis, the Horns lead the nation in free-throw rate with the seven-footer averaging 8.6 free throws per game.
Vokietaitis is also turnover-prone at 1.9 per game and a rate of 15.9 percent because he gets called for offensive fouls and often loses the ball in traffic.
“Over time, I think we’ve been better at recognizing what a good opportunity is for him and what not a good opportunity is,” Miller said.
Against Texas A&M, which will use ball pressure to make post-entry feeds more difficult and likely double team Vokietaitis after the catch, the Texas center will have to identify those double teams and play securely with the basketball to take advantage of his size mismatches on the block.
The paradoxical aspect of the Aggies offensively is that despite the adjusted tempo, A&M only scores 12.3 fastbreak points per game, tied for 127th nationally, but McMillan’s team will force Texas to identify shooters, including on the secondary break.
The most dangerous shooter is guard Ruben Dominguez, an experienced Spaniard with good size at 6’6, 213 pounds who played over 150 professional games in Europe before arriving in College Station. A 46.2-percent shooter, Dominguez shots with volume and accuracy — at 3.6 made threes per game, Dominguez ranks seventh nationally, and he’s taken almost twice as many as his teammate with the next-highest volume, guard Rylen Griffen.
“Dominguez, just watching him shoot the basketball, it’s astonishing the level of shooter he is, how many he gets off per game, the percentage in the efficiency of his three-point shooting,” Miller said. “It’s alarming, and I think that every team tries to make their players aware of the significance, in particular, of Dominguez, what he can do alone.”
After transferring from Kansas, Griffen is shooting 40 percent from the arc, and Pop Isaacs has been finding his stride in SEC play as well, scoring a season-high 21 points against Auburn with four made threes and hitting four more triples in the double-overtime loss to Tennessee.
“Looking at Isaacs the last five, six games, he seemed to really settle in. He’s the most comfortable that he’s been, and his performances, back-to-back-to back, just really jump off the page,” Miller said.
Across multiple aspects of the game, Bucky Ball will stress the improvement Texas has made since the two-game losing streak to start conference play.
“Our team is learning how to play at a higher level. We were not playing especially well on the defensive end, at the level needed to win — to make winning plays, to be consistent, block shots, deflections, steals, not fouling, getting more defensive rebounds, not breaking down in the last 10 seconds of the shot clock, being able to run and get back and make the game five-on-five. I think there’s a lot of those areas where we’re incrementally better today than we would have been two weeks ago,” Miller said.
With the team’s NCAA Tournament odds going from less than 10 percent to almost 67 percent with the two wins over ranked opponents, Texas has to maintain its improved effort level and attention to detail to take advantage of the home rivalry game opportunity against an evenly-matched opponent in overall adjusted efficiency — A&M slots one spot higher in Bart Torvik’s rankings.
Expect an exciting game at the Moody Center on Saturday with the Horns holding a 64-percent win probability. Tip is at 5:00 p.m. on SEC Network.
