"Where's Lubbock?" It's Squarely on Oklahoma State's Basketball Radar for Saturday
STILLWATER – Oklahoma State could have led off Big 12 Conference play with top-ranked Arizona (12-0). Hey, it’s pretty cool when the No. 1 team in the country is from your conference. Iowa State (13-0) is No. 3. Houston (12-1) and BYU (11-1) are both in the top 10. You could call the Big 12, the big nasty.
“We’re walking into the best league in the country and that’s no easy task,” Oklahoma State head coach Steve Lutz said after giving his team credit for “handling their business” and acknowledging they have room to improve, particularly on defense.
Lutz has pushed the defense to do more. In the last non conference game,a 103-77 win over Bethune Cookman, the defense did well in that area. Jaylen Curry had four steals and Christian Coleman and Vyctorius Miller has had a pair. Lutz was happy and said they could use more forced turnovers to their advantage. He wants stops and lots of them.
“Texas Tech is obviously a different, a different animal and Christian Anderson is one of the best point guards in the country, so you’re not going to be able to expect to have whatever we had tonight and force 19 turnovers,” Lutz said after the Bethune Cookman win. That still can be something that helps us.”
“I thought we were more active, more aggressive,” Lutz said. “They are trying more to do what is asked defensively.”
Truth be told, this opener, even with Oklahoma State sporting a 12-1 record and Texas Tech, despite being 9-3, ranked as high as No. 15 in the polls; is between two of the more offensive and less defensive teams in the Big 12. It drives both coaches, the Cowboys Lutz and Texas Tech head coach Grant McCasland nuts.
| Defensive Category | OSU NCAA Rank | OSU Value | Texas Tech NCAA Rank | Tech Value |
| Scoring Defense | 296 | 78.3 ppg | 180 | 73.2 ppg |
| FG% Defense | 115 | 42% | 251 | 44.75% |
| 3-pt% Defense | 151 | 32.3% | 139 | 32.1% |
| Turnovers Forced | 118 | 13.5 to pg | 234 | 11.9 to pg |
Stats that are near or on the bottom of the Big 12, certainly nothing to write home about. On offense, the Cowboys average 91.2 points per game and Texas Tech averages 83.8 per game.
Toward the end of the news conference with the Big 12 opener looming ahead at noon on Saturday. I asked the three players sitting there in Anthony Roy, Parsa Fallah, and Kanye Clary if they’d been to Lubbock. That trio is part of a majority transfer team that Lutz has put together.
“What’s Lubbock?” That was the response of Fallah, who has come from Oregon State and started out at Southern Utah. Roy and Clary kind of giggled at the response and Clary jumped in and said he had been to Lubbock.
The object by late afternoon on Saturday won’t be knowing where Lubbock is, but having done what is required to win once you get there.
