Bohls: Full steam ahead for the selfless Jabari Rice, Texas' instant scorer off the bench

One of these days, maybe, just maybe, Rodney Terry will be charitable and give Jabari Rice a start.

Just to be different and all.

Uh, nah. Don’t count on it.

The interim Texas basketball coach is more than satisfied with Rice coming off the bench as he has for all 25 of the Longhorns' games this season.

And, not surprisingly, so is Rice.

Why wouldn’t they all be happy?

It’s a blueprint that has worked almost to perfection for No. 5 Texas, a 20-5 team that hasn’t so much peaked as it has wire-to-wire been one of the best and most consistent college basketball teams in the nation as well as the Big 12 front-runner with a 9-3 mark.

So why disturb a good thing?

A formula relying on selfless play and balanced scoring paid off once more Saturday when the Longhorns obliterated a good West Virginia team that had come in on a hot streak with wins in four of its last five games. Texas crushed the visitors 94-60 in probably its most complete game of the year.

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From start to finish, UT absolutely scalded a Mountaineers team that is 4-8 in Big 12 play despite five Quad 1 wins and is desperate to pile up a few more victories to impress the NCAA selection committee. And Rice was instrumental on a team where the coach plays nine regularly.

The sixth-year senior transfer guard from New Mexico State lit up the Mountaineers with a season-high 24 points in just under 17 minutes on the floor. He inflicted all that damage with just five field goals, four of them from behind the arc. It’s hard to beat that kind of production from someone who maximizes his minutes.

“Without a doubt, he’s the best sixth man in the best conference in the country,” Terry said. “So that would make him the best sixth man in college basketball.”

He’ll get no argument here.

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Finding his role at Texas and flourishing

And not starting doesn’t bother Rice, even though he started 32 of New Mexico State's 34 games last season before entering the transfer portal and arriving in Austin. He came in after playing with prolific Aggies scorer Teddy Allen, the brother of Longhorn Timmy Allen, who helped persuade Rice to become a teammate.

“You have to step up when your name is called,” Rice said. “The starting five is not going to have a great game every single game.”

They don’t have to when Texas has the nation’s 17th-highest scoring output from the bench, which accounted for exactly half of UT’s 94 points Saturday.

The 47 points by backups such as Rice, Arterio Morris (12), Brock Cunningham (six) and even walk-on Cole Bott (a 3-pointer) came close to doubling the Longhorn reserves’ average of 28.7 points. In fact, Rice’s 24 points equaled the production of three of the Longhorns' starters combined — Allen, Dylan Disu and Dillon Mitchell.

It’d be a misnomer to label Rice a reserve since he’s the first one off the bench and has now scored in double figures 15 times this season and a whopping 73 times in his college career.

Of course, most of his 1,398 points came in Las Cruces, where he spent five years, including a redshirt freshman season, and excelled as a three-time All-Western Athletic Conference player. That included 74 starts for NMSU during which his game steadily improved.

He wasn’t a prolific scorer for the Aggies, averaging no more than 10 points a game. But Rice has always done the little things, the dirty work that helped NMSU knock off fifth-seeded UConn in the NCAA Tournament last year before falling to No. 4 Arkansas in the Round of 32.

Terry was well aware of Rice’s exploits. After all, Terry had been the head coach at UTEP before joining Chris Beard at Texas and saw firsthand the value that this Fort Bend Marshall product out of the Houston area could bring. The skinny guard didn’t get a ton of interest from recruiters out of high school, but Miami and LSU gave him a look. Texas was overjoyed to get him on the rebound.

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The versatility of the one-time player on Longhorn legend T.J. Ford’s AAU team is always on display, not excluding his ranking as Texas' third-leading scorer. He had 10 rebounds in the road win over Kansas State. Twice, he’s had five assists in a game. He blocked two Creighton shots and repeated that two other games. He's Texas' most proficient free-throw shooter at 85% among those who have attempted 23 or more from the line.

“From the time we recruited Jabari and made our very first pitch to him,” Terry said, “we told him we needed a guy who wants to come in and win at a high level and do whatever he can for the team. And he said, ‘I’ll do whatever.’ He’s had that approach the entire time.”

Rice is heating up at just the right time

The player with the best pump fake in the game hasn’t had to rely on it as much lately.

That’s because Rice's shots are falling, but it also could be extensive scouting reports on him by this point in the season.

“I’m knocking down shots now,” Rice said. “At first I wasn’t hitting shots. But fortunately my shot is going down.”

Boy, has it.

In the last five games, Rice has scored 21, 21, 14, 12 and now 24 points. Texas has won two of those games when he’s had 20-plus points, but that only partly underscores his tremendous value to this team.

They ought to call him Instant Rice because of what he brings to the team offensively. But he’s also almost automatic at the free-throw line, where he was a perfect 10-for-10 Saturday, a day when Texas almost hit every one of its free throws, save for a Disu miss that left the Longhorns with 24-of-25 accuracy on the day.

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Bob Huggins noticed Rice’s performance from his front-row seat.

Of course, if he hadn’t, Rice was there to point it out to him.

“He made shots. You make shots, you’re very valuable,” the West Virginia head coach said. “And he talks a lot.”

To him?

“A little,” Huggins said. “I didn’t pay much attention.”

Rice isn’t one to toot his own Horn, but he did show off a furious fist pump after a breakaway dunk to ignite the crowd of 10,763 midway through the second half. He was pulled from the game shortly thereafter. He returned for a couple of minutes but easily could have surpassed his career-high of 29 points while he was at NMSU.

Besides being unselfish, Rice is also very honest.

He owned up to the origin of his devastating pump fake, which has forced one defender after another to leave his feet and allow Rice to drive unmolested to the basket for uncontested layups.

“Yeah, I got it from my old teammate John Walker,” he said of the move. “He used to use it. I stole it from him.”

That’s the extent of anything fake about Rice. Everything else is real.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Texas is glad it found Jabari Rice, instant bench scorer, in portal