This may be the last time I beat this particular horse, though I can’t promise that.
Texas coach Rick Barnes never has been one to tell 299-pound sophomore center Dexter Pittman to take advantage of his weight.
But the UT coach changed his thinking during Friday night’s NCAA South Regional semifinal against Stanford’s two 7-foot giants. It paid huge returns, as Pittman leaned, pushed and shoved the Cardinal’s Lopez twins during a critical second-half stretch that paved the way to the Longhorns’ 82-62 Sweet 16 victory in front of a pro-Texas crowd of 32,931 at Reliant Stadium.
In other words, there were ten thousand unsold seats, and all of about 2000 tickets sold since Monday when it was known that the Longhorns would be in town for this. Someone at Reliant Stadium better start rethinking their marketing strategy for 2010 and 2011. I still can’t believe they didn’t do better than this.
The layout of Reliant was horrible last night. We sat in Row J of the club level and while the seats weren’t that high vertically from the court, it felt like we were about half a mile horizontally from the court. It’s my understanding that this was a test case for the NCAA. It failed…and quite frankly, they need to only use basketball arenas for basketball games.