Texas Southern Basketball: 3 keys to a First Four victory on Wednesday

1. Turn failures into success

Hearing the old adage about failures begetting success can be frustrating for people in the heat of a loss. No team in the history of the contemporary NCAA Tournament embodies that more than the Tigers, though.

Texas Southern lost their first 13 games of the season. They did not win a single game until SWAC play began. In making the NCAA Tournament, they became the first team since 1985 to go from winless through 13 to dancing in March.

Some of those losses were ugly, but perhaps the Tigers were simply preparing themselves for the eventuality of NCAA Tournament games. Sure, Kansas, Baylor, and Gonzaga crushed Texas Southern. But they lost by single digits to Washington State, Clemson, and Oregon; those are good losses.

Taking lessons from those games in terms of on-court production is challenging – they all had radically different scorelines. But the fact of the matter remains the same: those teams didn’t intimidate Texas Southern then.

They won’t now.

“We’ve got guys that can play,” coach Mike Davis said recently (h/t KHOU11). “They don’t fear anyone.”

That should especially be true against a team that will be just as unheralded as Texas Southern will be as the two compete to face Xavier.