It’s no secret that No. 1 Baylor’s winning streak has grown to such proportions over the last three months that it’s become the elephant in the room.
With a win over TCU at 3 p.m. Saturday at the Ferrell Center, the Bears can extend their winning streak to a school-record 18 games.
But the Baylor players choose not to think about it.
“That’s not something we talk about,” said Baylor guard Jared Butler. “We talk about making sure we take every game and every day and making sure we don’t take it for granted and making sure we are not looking too far ahead and we’re not starting to believe what everyone is saying. That we have our own identity and not something that somebody else told us we are, I think that is a big thing for us.”
The Bears’ day-to-day focus has been so sharp that they haven’t lost since Nov. 8 when Washington came from behind for a 67-64 win at the Armed Forces Classic in Anchorage.
Since then, the Bears (18-1, 7-0) have won eight home games, six road games and three on neutral courts. With Wednesday’s 67-53 win over Iowa State in Ames, Baylor tied coach Scott Drew’s 2011-12 team for the longest winning streak in school history at 17 games.
After playing five of their last seven games on the road, the Bears are happy to be back home against the Horned Frogs (13-7, 4-3). Baylor has drawn its best home crowds of the season in its last two games at the Ferrell Center with 8,500 watching a 68-55 win over Iowa State on Jan. 15 and a season-high 9,217 watching a 61-57 win over Oklahoma on Jan. 20.
“We’re excited to be back home, excited to play in front of our home fans, and excited to sleep in our own beds,” Drew said. “The louder the Ferrell, the better we play. Our guys feed off that. So hopefully it’s loud and we play well.”
Baylor forward Freddie Gillespie will be available after he suffered a cut above his left eye following a collision under the basket in the second half of Wednesday’s game at Iowa State. He came back into the game to finish with 12 points, nine rebounds and three blocks.
“That just describes Freddie,” Butler said. “He is still running down the court and I’m like ‘Freddie, you got blood on your face.’ But you know man, he is a tough guy.”
Gillespie was still wearing a big patch over the cut Friday, but he said he didn’t need stitches.
“I’ll be alright,” Gillespie said. “Rub a little dirt on it. At first I didn’t realize it. I was out there and I was like that’s not sweat. That’s kind of thick to be sweat and then when I started to walk off it started to hurt a lot. The adrenaline from the initial hit, I didn’t really feel it. But then once I started to walk off and started to get it fixed up and then it started to feel like a really hard pounding.”
The Horned Frogs are looking for their second upset of a Top 25 team in the last two weeks after pulling off a 65-54 win over then-No. 18 Texas Tech on Jan. 21 in Fort Worth. Since then TCU has dropped games to Arkansas and Texas.
TCU features three players averaging double-figure scoring, including guard Desmond Bane with 16.5 points per game, guard RJ Nembhard with 12.4 points and center Kevin Samuel with 11.5 points.
Bane is a superb all-around player who is shooting 44.1 percent from 3-point range while averaging 6.4 rebounds and 3.5 assists.
“I knew Coach (Jamie) Dixon does a great job and I knew they’d be right in the mix,” Drew said. “They’ve got some very talented players who have been there. Nembhard, Bane and Samuel are key contributors and very good players. But Coach Dixon always gets his teams to play hard and they execute well and they don’t beat themselves. You’ve got to beat them.”
Baylor has been one of the premier defensive teams in the nation all season as it has limited opponents to 58.3 points per game and a 38.2 shooting percentage.
But the Bears are still looking for more consistent offensive production after shooting 40.3 percent in their 7-0 Big 12 start. Butler leads Baylor with a 12.6 scoring average in Big 12 games, but is shooting just 35.4 percent from the field including 21.4 percent from 3-point range.
MaCio Teague is averaging 12.3 points in conference play, but is shooting 34.2 percent from the field with a 25.6 3-point percentage.
The Bears know how big of a target they’ve become as the nation’s No. 1 team, so they don’t want shortcomings in any part of their game to result in their first Big 12 loss.
“It would be a disservice to us to just slack off one game and to just not give it our all and not compete to the highest level we can,” Butler said. “It would be like we would look back at it and regret it. I just think that is not what I want to do and I know these guys don’t want to do it and that’s what you see on the court. It’s not a sense of confidence, it’s just a sense of all of us wanting to be great.”