Baylor at No. 12 Texas | Big 12 | 2.27.23

AUSTIN – Not so fast, Texas.
If the reigning 12-time Big 12 champions can't win it, the Baylor Bears (19-10, 10-7) wanted to at least delay the 12th-ranked Longhorns' party, pulling out a 63-54 road win Monday night before an announced crowd of 10,763 at the Moody Center.
"Whew! It felt amazing," said junior guard Sarah Andrews, who played all 40 minutes and scored 11 of her 17 points in the second half. "I think everybody tonight stepped up huge. We showed we can play with anybody in the country tonight."
Trying to win its first conference title in 19 years, Texas (22-8, 13-4) had its 12-game home winning streak snapped while scoring a season-low 54 points. Now only a half-game up on 16th-ranked Oklahoma (22-5, 12-4), the Longhorns will have to wait until Saturday's game at Kansas State to try to win at least a share of the league championship.
"Biggest disappointment is that you're playing for a championship," said Texas coach Vic Schaefer, "and for whatever reason, we weren't ready to go. We had so much at stake, and you'd think we'd have a little more juice."

In the postgame handshake, Schaefer told second-year Baylor head coach Nicki Collen, "You guys were the tougher team today."

Those words were music to the ears of Collen, whose message going into the game was: "Toughness, toughness, toughness."

"We've got to battle," Collen said. "Our little guards have to battle their big guards. Their guards had nine offensive rebounds the first time we played them. We knew we had to keep their guards off the boards just as much as their posts. . . . I was just really proud of them. I thought they battled all night long. They did what they have to do."

Undersized against the Longhorns' frontcourt rotation of 6-2 DeYona Gaston, 6-4 forwards Khadija Faye and Amina Muhammad and 6-5 center Femme Masudi, 6-1 freshman Darianna Littlepage-Buggs record her 14th double-double of the season and 10th in conference play with 19 points and 13 rebounds, scoring 15 points in the first half.

"We worked on that a lot," said Littlepage-Buggs, who grabbed six of the Bears' 13 offensive boards. "We knew we were going to be undersized in the post. But honestly, just working on what we did in practice and bringing it to practice and executing it, that was our biggest thing."

Other than falling behind 7-2 in the first two minutes, Baylor played from ahead for most of the game, tying it on a three-point play by Buggs and taking a 20-18 lead when Andrews knocked down a jumper at the end of the first quarter. Buggs scored 11 of the Bears' first 13 points, going 5-for-8 from the floor in the first period.

"She was on fire," Andrews said. "Our freshmen, honestly, are special. Buggs grew a lot. She stepped up and knocked down big shots. She carried us going into halftime. I think we just fed off her energy and wanted to keep fighting."
Baylor led 37-32 at halftime and was still up five, 50-45, going into the fourth quarter. After trading baskets through the first three minutes, the Bears scored seven unanswered points on an Andrews layup and 3-pointer sandwiched around an offensive rebound and putback by 6-3 freshman Kyla Abraham to go up 61-49.
"We're just kind of grinding with the bodies we have," said Collen, who got a combined 18 minutes from Abraham and Illinois transfer Erika Porter, who had played in just five of Baylor's first 16 league games.
"You just have to go with what you've got. For us, that was Kyla. And then, when Kyla had kind of a dumb foul, I went to Erika and gave her a go. She was a little lost with some of our schemes, but I thought she played really, really hard. That was what we needed. We just needed someone to play hard."
While the Bears missed their last four shots and seven of their last eight, they held on to win for the 12th-straight time in Austin and beat a ranked team on the road for the fourth time this season. One of just four programs in the nation to play at least 11 ranked teams, Baylor improved to 5-6 versus top-25 teams, including a neutral-site win over current No. 11 Villanova.
Ja'Mee Asberry was Baylor's only other double-digit scorer with 10 points, four rebounds and three assists. Limited by foul trouble, senior forward Caitlin Bickle had just five points, three assists and one rebound in 23 minutes. Abraham matched her career-high with six points, while Jaden Owens had three points and a team-high seven assists.