We got a little taste of the Jamie Dixon effect last year when TCU came out of nowhere as a 9 seed and pushed 1 seeded Arizona to the wire before losing 85-80 in an NCAA second round game.
The Horned Frogs are no longer a local secret in college basketball.
They have jumped into the national rankings at 14 and solidified their position when they came into Allen and buried second ranked Kansas 80-63, giving the Jayhawks their second largest loss at home under Bill Self.
This was the first win ever for TCU at Allen in program history and the first time Kansas lost consecutive games in the state since 1989.
And it is further proof how good the Big 12 is top to bottom, where as many.as eight teams could go to the dance.
“The way they chewed gum. The way they tied their shoes. Everything they did was perfect today,” Self said. “They played great. They’re so fast. They’re so athletic off the bench. Their bench was unbelievable– That was a beatdown.”
Dixon, a onetime child actor from Southern California who played at TCU, gave an Oscar winning performance in his first head coaching job when he replaced Ben Howland at Pitt in 2003. He coached the Panthers for 13 seasons, leading them to 10 NCAA tournaments, including seven in his first seven seasons. His team was ranked No. 1 in 2009, the same year it advanced to the Elite Eight. He struggled with recruiting after Pitt left the Big East for the ACC, and left in 2015 to take a job at his alma mater.the
This is his best team in Ft Worth.
The Frogs (15-4, 4-3) came in laser focused, making 13 of their first 15 shots. That type of offensive production– both from the starters and their athletic bench, turned a 14-13 TCU lead into a 33-13 nightmare deficit for Kansas. The horned Frogs largest run in a game full of them was 19-0 and it featured TCU’s defense holding the Jayhawks (18-3, 5-2) scoreless for more than five minutes.
Kansas trailed by 10 at half, but never got within single figures. “I thought we were playing like there was a 10-point play in our back pocket,” Self said. ‘That’s happens a lot when you get behind.”
TCU, which shot 54.4 percent, got 17 points fr om backup guard Shahada Wells and 15 apiece from guard Mike Miles Jr. and 11 from Damion Baugh.
Miles, a 6-2 junior guard who was the Big 12 pre-season Player of the Year, grew up playing basketball for the Texas Titan, the AAU team, alongside Cade Cunningham, the No 1 pick in the 2021 as a freshman at Oklahoma State. When he was in fourth grade, his AAU highlight videos drew national attention and Yahoo Sports labeled him “the elementary school Allen Iverson. He was selected area player of the year by the Dallas Morning News his senior year at Lancaster Tex. High and chose TCU over LSU, Oregon and Oklahoma State, giving Dixon a huge building block. He thought about declaring for the draft following his sophomore year but opted to stay in school.”
Miles is the key for a team that can go nine deep and showed it would still flourish without its 6-11 big Eddie Lumpkins who was hobbled late in the first half with a high ankle sprain but later return to finish with 8 points and 4 rebounds.
For a team that was coming off a 74-65 loss at West Virginia, the Frogs looked poised and confident in winning for the first time ever against a Top 5 team on the road after 17 losses.
“When I got here, all i heard was that we’d never won at pretty much every school in the Big 12,” Dixon said. ‘And we finally got this one. This was the hardest one.”
Jalen Wilson, Kansas’ latest All America, led the Jayhawks for 30 points after getting 38 in a loss at Kansas State. But the Jayhawks got little production from any one else. Gradey Dick, Dajuan Harris Jr. and KJ Adams combined to shot 4 for 23 for the game.
The Frogs could sense the inevitable when Kansas fans became heading for the exits at the under eight media timeout in the second half.
“When we saw that, we knew we had the game,” Miles said.
TCU dissected Kansas with layup after layup, leading Wilson to question his team’s defensive effort. “Today they had pretty much whatever they wanted to get,” he said. ‘We just have to take pride in guarding, getting steps. it’s been two games in a row where teams are way too comfortable against us.”
