Here's my overall assessment. I held out a slight amount of hope that Texas could win since South Carolina lost one of their interior players in Ashlyn Watkins. But, I also thought we'd be in trouble if our 5 starters didn't show up offensively and no Laila Phelia available.
Vic wants to believe he can out-physical and out-athlete all his opponents. That works against a lot of teams. It will never work against teams like South Carolina, UConn, and LSU, to name a few. All those teams are just as physical and just as athletic. Those teams are just so much better than us offensively.
Until Vic puts an emphasis on offensive strategy and quality shooters, we will be limited. This South Carolina team reminds of some of Mulkey's teams at Baylor. Playing their own brand of physical, pound it inside basketball won't beat them is they were so good at it; the only way to beat them (like ISU and Oregon State did on occasion) was to out-shoot them, especially from the perimeter. Attempting five 3-point shots and making only one of them late by Preston was never gonna be enough.
In all our non-conference blowouts, Vic put so much emphasis on pounding the ball inside so Taylor and Kyla could get layup practice from 2-feet under the basket. That was never going to help against teams where we needed to be creative on offense and have our perimeter players trying to improve their confidence shooting the ball in actual games; those games should have also been used to run plays for the perimeter shooters. Didn't feel like we ran many plays today that stretched the defense.
We as fans on here always hate when opponents play zone defense against us, and so does Vic. Well, SC played man-to-man defense today all game and they ate our lunch time and time again. Holle can't create her own shot for the most part, and she wasn't left wide open maybe more than once. Lee also was guarded tightly and couldn't get her feet set to shoot more than 6 times the whole game.
Bottom line is that South Carolina is bigger, stronger, quicker and deeper than Texas at just about every position; Booker was potentially the only player who'd be a starter at SC and she has not been good in SEC play (8 points at OU; 3 points at home against Arkansas; and 7 points at SC). I doubt she wins SEC POY as she was voted in the pre-season.