MORGANTOWN, WV – With 12:28 to go in the second half, Texas Tech’s junior superstar Mac McClung, a transfer from Georgetown, gets a layup off to extend the Red Raiders lead over the West Virginia Mountaineers to 12, 64-52. Those two points get McClung to 19 total points in the outing, with plenty of time to go.
Stay consistent and continue playing well, and the Red Raiders will be heading back to Lubbock with a huge win on the road and get them to 3-3 in Quadrant 1 games.
Keep doing what you’ve been doing, right?
The clock ticks down to 10:03 to go, and McClung dribbles the ball in from half court to the top of the key to meet Terrance Shannon and Marcus Santos-Silva screening both sides of his defender. McClung chooses to take Shannon’s screen, which frees up Santos-Silva to roll down to the block and get the pass in from McClung. Santos-Silva puts up a somewhat crazy shot but gets it to fall and extends the lead to 66-57 with 9:52 to go.
It seems like the Red Raiders will start to pull away and leave with a double-digit lead.
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In high school, McClung was really uneasy about his notoriety when his highlights started making the rounds on Twitter and YouTube. He recalls being asked for pictures when he was going out with friends in high school in his small town of Garden City, Virginia. In a May 2020 interview with Bryan Kalbrosky of USA Today, he goes as far to say “we would go different places, and people would ask for pictures, and I’m like… that’s weird. You know what I mean? I didn’t think people would want pictures with me.”
His perspective is understandable – when you’re just a junior in high school and videos about you are regularly getting over a million views, it can be hard to fathom. Your world is only as far as you know it to that point, and when all you know is Garden City, Virginia, with a population just under 50,000 according to LongandFoster, that’s not very far.
McClung knew that he wanted to make it to the “big stage,” especially coming from such a small town. He talks about it in his interview with Kalbrosky, saying “[Gate City] molded me as a person. You know, how I hold myself today. …. Living in a small town, it’s a lot more difficult to make it to, you know, make it to the big stage, so I mean, I feel like it will be something that makes me more proud. Being where I’m from.”
It’s hard not to relate to that. You root for the people that make you proud of where you come from. For me personally, I will always root for Kevin Knox to succeed in the NBA because he makes me proud to be from the Tampa Bay area. For the folks of Garden City, I’m sure all they want to do is see McClung succeed so he can put their city on the map.
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Following the Santos-Silva prayer that extends the Red Raiders lead, West Virginia wastes no time getting down to the other end and forcing Texas Tech to play defense. [Player] does a solid enough job closing out on Shane McNeil’s three-point attempt to force a miss, but Jarret Culver gets the offensive board to clean up and shrink the lead to 7. That doesn’t seem like a huge deal in any normal circumstance, but were talking about the Big 12 here, the conference with 7 of its 10 members in the top 35 of KenPom’s rankings. No lead is safe.
When you have McClung on your team, though, you know who needs to have the ball in their hands when a game is close.
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While most people know McClung for his electric dunks and his insane mixtapes, including a self-reported 48 inch vertical jump, McClung watches film on ball handlers to improve his game. He doesn’t really watch the pros you would say right off the bat that are athletic. “I watch the Steve Nash’s, the Jason Kidd’s, the Kyrie Irving’s, like, that’s what I feel like I can add to my game, you know? I feel like I have the athleticism but I need to know how to use it, and um, also knowing how to score not using it sometimes,” McClung states in his interview with Kalbrosky.
You can tell he gets the mentality from Kyrie in his game, being able to get downhill, pull up from three, and make smart decisions with the ball. This is shown in his true shooting percentage this season, 57.3%, which is good enough to be in the top 500 of all active 4,511 D-I players according to KenPom. He hasn’t always been the best three-point shooter, though. In fact, he’s improved his three-point percentage each season he’s played in college, and now has it up to 35.4% on the season. This is something he has worked diligently on. He states in the USA Today interview “[Prior to last season] I was really focused on my three-point shot and my pull-up game and trying to show I had more to my game [than just dunking].” To his credit, he now has a much, much more rounded game and proven he can and will play in the NBA someday.
Even as late as just 7:53 remaining on the clock, Texas Tech held a 12-point lead, 73-61, off of a Mac McClung jumper that got his total on the night to 23 points, while shooting a respectable 9-16 from the field including, 3-6 from behind the arc.
This was a great game even by his standards, and he even got some of his family out from Garden City to make the almost 5 hour drive to Morgantown to come watch the game, including both his mom and dad. Barring an offensive and defensive meltdown from the Red Raiders, or an offensive outpouring from the Mountaineers, McClung’s family should be excited to make that drive back with a win, right?
Oh boy. They really got the latter option.
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Whipple’s May 2020 article on the CasualHoya posed a valid question after McClung’s sophomore season, saying that he could attack and shoot like a shooting guard, but why would Georgetown’s head coach Patrick Ewing give him the point guard role if he hasn’t shown the ability to facilitate or distribute. It seemed as if McClung’s decision to transfer from Georgetown was because of the feedback he got from the NBA this year, in that he needs to show more ability to run the offense with the ball in his hands.
His list of the final seven schools he was considering consisted of Auburn, Memphis, USC, BYU, Arkansas, Wake Forest and Texas Tech. All of these schools made sense in that McClung more than likely would have been the primary ball-handler in the lineup at any given moment (with the exception of Auburn, who was in limbo and unsure about Sharife Cooper’s eligibility).
What the Red Raiders had that the other schools didn’t was players on the roster who had been to a national championship game. McClung could both show off why he was an NBA-level player, while also having the roster makeup of a team that could make a run at a Final Four. Even if he didn’t say this was exactly his reasoning, it’s hard to argue otherwise.
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What McClung and Texas Tech didn’t know at the time, however, is that Culver’s put-back started a streak of ten straight made shots to close out the game. Just writing that sounds impossible to grasp. Even when you were watching, it wasn’t something you noticed right away. Honestly, I didn’t even realize it until I started looking through the play-by-play after the game.
It’s one thing to say it, but another thing to show what that looks like played out in a basketball game. I’ll fast forward a bit so I can put that into perspective for you. The last field goal West Virginia missed, McNeil’s missed corner three, Texas Tech was up 66-57 with 9:40 left to go.
A Miles McBride made three-pointer with a minute and 38 seconds to go tied the game up at 84. Texas Tech just simply could not stop the Mountaineers, no matter what they did. They didn’t look prepared for screens, couldn’t close out well enough to affect shots, anything.
But Kevin McCullar, off of a pass he got to keep the ball inbounds, found a wide-open McClung from three. You know that when the game is tied with a minute left and it could go either way, you get it to the player you have the most faith in. I think just about every single person watching knew that Texas Tech would somehow find a way to set up Mac McClung to give them one last push.
Of course, he drilled it. He’s Mac McClung.
West Virginia wasn’t done just yet though, unfortunately for the McClung family and Texas Tech fans. Just to remind you, the Mountaineers made every shot they took in the final 9 minutes and 35 seconds.
Incredible, isn’t it? College basketball is so much fun because you get games like this at what would appear to be a run-of-the-mill, ranked team matchups. And there was still time left.
A Taz Sherman layup put the game within one, Terrance Shannon put up a contested three that just didn’t fall, Miles McBride then got triple teamed but STILL hit the layup to give West Virginia their first lead in 18 minutes and 34 seconds of game time, 88-87.
And with no timeouts left and only six seconds to respond, you know who Texas Tech gave the ball to? Yep. You guessed it.
But this time, it just barely didn’t fall. But it will just make Mac McClung work even harder to get better, every day, every year.
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