40 Acres Sports

For healthy, curse-free Barnes, it’s all ‘gosh, darn’ these days. Coach is a big advocate of Metamucil apparently.

Women’s basketball gets a 8 seed in NCAA Tournament. Earlier in the year I didn’t think they’d get in, congrats!

Rick Barnes threatens Arkansas fans. I love poking the Piggies with a stick. Should have them nice and riled up.r

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship finally gets underway this week. Watching the Longhorns and the rest of the field of 65 will keep us enthralled until the tournament wraps up on April 7th in San Antonio, but it wouldn’t be March without a little bracket madness.

You’ve probably already got half a dozen brackets filled out, fill out one more and join the Bevo Sports Tournament Challenge group over at ESPN. Feel free to invite your friends or other Texas fans to join as well. The more the merrier, you’re all going down anyways.

It’s been a while since [tag]AJ Abrams[/tag] has been in a groove, but he certainly was feeling it Saturday afternoon against the [tag]Oklahoma[/tag] Sooners. In the Big 12 tourney semifinals, Abrams got out of his funk in a big way by making 7 of 12 three point attempts to score 24 points. His shooting helped the Horns take a close game at half time and turn it into a blowout.

ESPN video highlights are below:

Next up for Texas is their third straight match-up with Kansas in the Big 12 Championship finals. Texas lost the previous two games and has never won a conference tournament since the Big 12 was formed. If the Horns can pull out the victory over KU, they’ve still got a shot at a #1 seed for the Big Dance. The game will be on ESPN Sunday at 2pm.

Related Links

• AP game recap
• Box score
• Postgame notes
• Postgame quotes (PDF)
• Photo gallery

The Longhorns got past the [tag]Oklahoma State[/tag] Cowboys on Friday afternoon by a score of 66-59. The Horns were up by a comfortable margin for almost the entire second half but could never quite put the Cowboys away and had to hold them off during one final run late. [tag]DJ Augustin[/tag] and [tag]Damion James[/tag] led the team on offense, both shooting the ball very well from the outside. On the defensive side of things [tag]Justin Mason[/tag] was active as usual and big man [tag]Connor Atchley[/tag] blocked four more shots.

Check out some video highlights below:

With the win Texas advances to the Big 12 Tournament semifinals. They’ll face off against the fourth-seeded Oklahoma Sooners on Saturday at 1pm. The game will be televised by ESPN2 and ESPN+ in Big 12 markets.

Saturday’s men’s Big 12 tournament semifinals preview. Quick thoughts from the DMN on today’s games.

The 2008 Big 12 Men’s Basketball Championship gets underway Thursday in Kansas City. The bottom eight seeds will all play on the first day, starting tomorrow morning when 8th seeded Texas Tech takes on 9th seeded Oklahoma State at 11:30am. The winner of that game will move on to face the Longhorns in the quarterfinals Friday, again at 11:30am.

Click on the bracket at right to view larger or download the PDF version below. Also check out the included links for more tourney information and to buy last minute tickets to the games.

All games will be on some sort of ESPN station, with the early games all on ESPNU, ESPN+, or ESPN2. Texas’ game Friday will be on ESPNU and ESPN+. The affiliates carrying the game inlcude KTXA (Dallas), KNWS (Houston), KCWX (San Antonio), and KNVA (Austin). The tournament championship game will be nationally televised Sunday at 2pm on ESPN.

Helpful Links

• Download PDF bracket
• ESPN+ affiliates carrying Texas games
• Big 12 Conference Tournament Tickets
• Official Big 12 Tournament page

Colorado coach says some Big 12 stars should go pro, including DJ Augustin. He’s just hoping to actually win some conference games next year.

Augustin, Abrams, and James named to AP All-Big 12 team. Augustin was unanimous first-team choice.