Roster building in college basketball is a year-to-year proposition in the era of the NCAA transfer portal and one-time transfer rule, but Texas head coach Chris Beard is already off to a good start putting together the squad for his second season on the Forty Acres with familiar faces Christian Bishop and Brock Cunningham back in the fold. Cunningham published a social media post to clarify previous comments on the subject of returning or not and officially declared his return for the 2022-23 season Monday night, something Bishop did with one emphatic statement Wednesday evening.
“This past season playing in the burnt orange with my brothers and Coach Beard has meant the world to me,” Bishop said in a message posted to his Twitter account. “That being said, I’m ready to work to take Texas Basketball to the Final Four.
“Longhorn Nation, I’m coming back [sic]”
Bishop received honorable mention All-Big 12 from the league’s coaches in his first season after transferring from Creighton, where he averaged eight points and 4.7 rebounds per game while shooting 64.5-percent from the field and blocked 82 shots in 90 games over three seasons with the Blue Jays. Averaging seven points per game in 34 games (23 starts), Bishop was Texas’ second-leading rebounder (5.6 per game) and led the Longhorns in blocked shots (31).
The 6-foot-7-inch Bishop shot 60 percent from the field (90-for-150), 67.5 percent from the foul line (56-for-83) and went 2-for-6 from 3-point range. He also dished out 25 assists and recorded 16 steals.
With Bishop and Cunningham (2.3 points and 2.3 rebounds per game, 24 steals, 22 assists and three blocked shots in 34 games) back, the Texas frontcourt has a chance to return fully intact from where it stood at the end of the season from a personnel standpoint. Six-foot-9-inch Dylan Disu (3.7 points and 3.2 rebounds per game) played better toward the end of the season, especially in the NCAA Tournament while recovering from an osteochondral defect in his knee suffered in his final season with the Vanderbilt program, is likely to return for a second season with the Longhorns.
If Texas once again has the services of second-team All-Big 12 forward Timmy Allen, the team’s leading scorer (12.1 points per game) and rebounder (6.4 per game) for the 2021-22 season, it would ease the burden tremendously on Beard and Co. finding capable bodies in the transfer portal or among the crop of unsigned high school recruits. With Bishop and Cunningham making public declarations and Disu expected to be back (the same goes for guard Devin Askew), the Longhorns can count on seven scholarship players in the fold with the four projected returnees, five-star McDonald’s All-American signees Dillon Mitchell and Arterio Morris and four-star verbal commit Rowan Brumbaugh.
With the exception of Jase Febres and Tristen Licon, every scholarship member of a team that went 22-12 and won the program’s first NCAA Tournament game since 2014 (an 81-73 first-round win over Virginia Tech) has the option to return for another season with the NCAA granting an extra season of eligibility to winter sports student-athletes impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. To this point, none of the other Texas players with that option — Allen, Avery Benson, Marcus Carr, Andrew Jones and Courtney Ramey — have made a public declaration one way or the other as of the time of Bishop’s announcement.
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