Golden: No. 1 LSU is the perfect early-season test for unranked Texas baseball

This is the test that the Texas Longhorns need.

In most seasons, a Texas-LSU showdown would be reserved for Omaha in the summer, but these traditional college baseball powers have moved up any potential meeting to the spring.

Golden:A swing and a miss for Texas in Waco, and the Horns' bench didn't do any favors

Tuesday’s 6:30 p.m. meeting at UFCU Disch-Falk Field is a nice early-season test for the Horns, who responded to three straight opening losses with a series win over Indiana this past weekend to improve to 3-4.

There’s nothing like meeting the No. 1 team in the nation to determine just where you stack up, especially the Horns, who are awash in new faces and unproven talents.

The late, great Augie Garrido would always schedule an early three-gamer against Stanford to gauge how his team measured up against a fellow blue blood. Shoot, a decade before he arrived here, he brought his Cal State Fullerton crew to Austin in 1983 to show his players a college baseball machine playing in one of the nation’s top facilities.

It’s all about evaluation and the Horns will have a chance to see where they stand in the most important midweek contest they'll play this season.

More:Porter Brown continues to impress in the field, at the plate as Texas gets past Indiana

The Tigers rolled into the 512 last week and won two of three games at the Round Rock Classic played at Dell Diamond, earning the tiebreaker nod over two other schools based on run deferential. They will walk into Disch-Falk with a 6-1 record behind an offense that’s averaging 9.8 runs per game and hitting .328.

Don’t expect to see a mainline starter like hard-luck staff ace Lucas Gordon, who sits at 0-0 despite being nails through two starts with an 0.84 ERA. With that said, you can best believe that coach David Pierce will pull whatever he must out of his bag if the Horns have a chance late in this one.

Beating ranked teams is how unranked teams get the notice of national voters. A win over the Tigers would be a huge step in cracking that top 25.

Besides, Texas baseball being unranked just doesn’t feel natural.

All eyes (and stopwatches) are on Bijan Robinson

Don’t run in Indianapolis, Bijan: Texas running back Bijan Robinson will reportedly participate in drills at this week's NFL scouting combine, but he shouldn’t run the 40-yard dash, which is the ultimate determinant in where a player stacks up athletically.

Not that Bijan isn’t fleet of foot, because he is.

Robinson is already the top-rated running back in the draft and he will surely blow away league scouts in drills and especially in interview sessions since he's easily one of the highest character players this program has ever produced.

That track at Lucas Oil Stadium, however, is much slower than the one on campus at Moncrief-Neuhaus. Wouldn’t it be great to watch Robinson kill it in the on-field drills and lifting, skip the 40 and follow up at Texas’ pro timing day on March 9 with a sizzling time on his home track to bolster his draft status?

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Knowing him the way we do, you can expect Robinson to lift, drill and ultimately run in Indy. He’s a competitor with a full grasp of the age-old devaluing of running backs, so he will be out to put his best two feet forward.

He will run and he will run swiftly.

Even if he shouldn’t.

Texas-Baylor game brings back Ferrell memories

A nod to the Ferrell Center: Texas' iconic Erwin Center took its last basketball breath following last season and Baylor’s Ferrell Center is following suit sometime during the 2024 season. Texas’ 82-71 loss to the Bears on Saturday was probably my last experience with the venerable on-campus facility, which has been the Bears' home for hoops, volleyball and other sports since opening in 1988.

It came 27 years after I walked into the arena for the first time, a wide-eyed young sportswriter with the Tyler Morning Telegraph. Sports editor Phil Hicks dispatched me to Waco to cover a TAPPS Class 2A state basketball semifinal between T.K. Gorman and Houston Westbury.

Gorman, my alma mater, had already captured a state football championship the previous fall down the road a piece at old Floyd Casey Stadium and the school was dreaming of a rare football-basketball double.

It didn’t come to pass for the Crusaders, but that day was the beginning of a long collaboration between yours truly and what I would come to recognize as one of the toughest college basketball environments in the country, and that includes the Baylor women’s teams that became a national superpower under the direction of Kim Mulkey.

Just like the Horns, the Baylor athletic administration understood the need to upgrade a facility for the second most important revenue producing program on campus.

More:Stormin' Norman: Texas women knock off Oklahoma, seize control of Big 12 title race

Time marches on and next season, the Foster Pavilion will be a smash just like Texas’ Moody Center. And our time covering games there will soon be over as next spring will be the last for Texas and Oklahoma in the Big 12 with the SEC up next.

We will miss the rivalries in several sports, the campus hospitality afforded to the visiting media and our longtime collaboration with Waco Tribune Herald sportswriters Brice Cherry and John Werner who have been great friends and colleagues to our staff.

Not quite the response Damian Lillard was looking for

Put away the cup: Imagine being Wilt Chamberlain sitting in the locker room on the night of March 2, 1962. He had just scored 100 points in a win over the New York Knicks, a record that will never broken.

And then a league official walks in and hands him a cup.

“Pee in this,” he says. “We’re drug testing you.”

I’m guessing Wilt never had to pee in a cup.

Such is the state of sports these days where extraordinary feats are met with a visit from the doctor. Portland star Damian Lillard, one of the best long-distance marksmen in league history, posted 71 points and made 13 3-pointers in a 131-114 win over Houston on Sunday night — the eighth most points scored in a game in league history — and was promptly informed that a drug test was coming.

Even more befuddling is that he was was forced to take tests on consecutive days.

“I did the urine test yesterday and they backed it up with the blood draw tonight after the game and it was actually the first time in my career being tested after a game,” Lillard told reporters. "And then, aside from that, they know that I'm scared of needles. I know I’ve got a lot of tattoos, but when you’re doing a blood draw, it’s different from tattoos.”

This came on the heels of Seattle Seahawks all-pro wideout DK Metcalf being informed he was being tested for performance-enhancing drugs after he put on a show by winning MVP honors at the NBA Celebrity All-Star game last weekend.

It’s getting to the point where we can’t even appreciate greatness anymore.

I write this knowing full well that many sluggers during baseball’s Steroid Era fooled most of us. Still, sometimes a great performance is just that.

Enough with the cups already.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Horns seek .500 record in Tuesday tilt with top-ranked LSU