Bobcats set for road test against ‘unorthodox’ UTRGV

Texas State head coach Danny Kaspar is bothered by his team’s slow starts on the road. 

The Bobcats started off slow at Drake and suffered their lone loss of the season. Texas State had slow starts against Cal Poly and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. With the Bobcats traveling to Edinburg to take on UT Rio Grande Valley, Kaspar wants to see his team put together a complete game. 

“You know, there have just been too many slow starts on offense and we have to, to beat good teams we’re going to have to play 40 minutes of solid basketball,” Kaspar said. “Our defense has been pretty solid but our offense has been at times good and at times stagnant.”

Texas State enters Saturday’s game against UTRGV on a seven-game winning streak. The Bobcats are off to the third best start in program history with their 9-1 record through the first 10 games. 

Senior forward Alex Peacock credits the strong start to the season to everyone trusting each other and buying into Kaspar’s system. 

“Everybody is just buying in and trusting each other, trusting the system and everything like that,” Peacock said. “Last year there were guys playing together for the first time and playing under Kaspar for the first time so there was a lot of hesitation. Now we just finally went head forward and said we might as well just do it.” 

Peacock says the team’s confidence is high but Kaspar believes the team can be overconfident at times. 

 “I feel like I have to keep them in the right place,” Kaspar said. “You know, I told them they’ve beaten some good teams but the best teams are yet to come — Arkansas, even this (UT) Rio Grande Valley team, and then the conference. The Conference overall is going to be a tougher sled than, I just think that conference opponents between Georgia State, Georgia Southern, (Louisiana) Lafayette those three for sure and probably Appalachian State are all going to be serious challenges for us. We can’t get content when we’re only one third through the season.”

UTRGV comes into Saturday’s game with a 7-4 record, including two wins over A&M-Corpus Christi and UT Arlington.

Offensively, the Vaqueros average 69.5 points per game. They have three players who average double-digit points per game — Junior forward Lesley Varner II (13.8), redshirt senior forward Terry Winn III (10.7) and sophomore guard Javon Levi (10). 

Defensively, UTRGV runs a constant press. The Vaqueros force an average of 18 turnovers per game, which ranks No. 13 in the country in turnovers forced. Kaspar calls the Vaqueros unorthodox.

“They press a lot for a college team,” Kaspar said. “You don’t see that as much where people are trapping … They’re trapping and they’re trying to trap on the first pass and then retrap in the middle and the corners, and we haven’t seen much of that in the first 10 games. And so, you try as best you can to replicate that in practice but we don’t do that as much as they do so it’s hard for us to do so.”

Tipoff between Texas State and UTRGV is set for 7 p.m. on Saturday. 

“It’s just another opponent in front of us and we got to take them as so,” Peacock said.