Oklahoma Basketball Has Gotten Better Every Year Under Lon Krug
By Chip Rouse
The fact that Oklahoma basketball has risen this season to the top in college basketball hasn’t happened overnight, but it has definitely has come about on coach Lon Kruger’s watch.
Kruger is the only NCAA Division I coach to take five different teams, including Oklahoma, to the NCAA Tournament. In five different head-coaching stops over a 30-year college coaching career, the OU head coach has a winning record everywhere he has been except at his first head-coaching assignment, at Pan-American, where he went 52-59 over four seasons.
Kruger is closing in on 600 career wins as a college head coach, and 102 of those have come while at Oklahoma.
The 63-year-old Oklahoma head coach inherited a Sooner team that went 14-18 and finished 10th in the 12-team Big 12 Conference in 2010-11, the season before he came on board as the 13th head coach in OU basketball history. His first season, in 2011-12, Oklahoma finished with a 15-16 overall record and eighth in the conference standings.
The Sooners missed the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive year in Kruger’s first season, but they have made it into the Big Dance every season since, and last season advanced all the way to the round of 16 before falling to Michigan State.
In 2012-13, Kruger’s second season at OU, the Sooners improved by five wins overall (20-12) and bettered their record in Big 12 play by six wins (11-7), finishing in a tie for fourth place in the league. Oklahoma improved again in 2013-14, with a record of 23-10 overall and a second place finish behind Kansas in the Big 12 with a 12-6 record.
Kruger’s best season as the Oklahoma head coach came last sea son. Led by the Big 12’s scoring leader and Player of the Year, Buddy Hield, OU won 24 games in 2014-15, losing 11 and tied for second place in the conference with Iowa State, both sporting 12-6 records in league play.
Since he took over the head-coaching responsibilities from Jeff Capel, Kruger’s Sooner teams have improved from a winning percentage of .483 his first season to .685 in year four, an improvement of 20 percentage points. And this season should blow by all the previous ones, with Oklahoma currently owning a 20-3 overall record, an .870 winning percentage and a No. 3 national ranking.
Some college basketball experts are projecting this to be the best season for Oklahoma basketball since the 1987-88 team under coach Billy Tubbs.
That Sooner squad, led by All-Americans Stacy King and Mookie Blaylock, went 35-4, was Big Eight regular season and postseason tournament champion and advanced all the way to the national championship game that year before losing to a very familiar foe, the Kansas Jayhawks.
It just so happens that Kansas is the team that will visit Norman, Okla., this weekend along with ESPN’s “College GameDay.” You can be certain that diehard Oklahoma fans have not forgotten that fateful NCAA Championship game 28 years ago.
None of the players who will take the court on Saturday were alive when that game was played back on April 4, 1988, but the rivalry between the two teams is as strong as ever, and it will be on full display for everyone to see in this Big 12 showdown on Saturday with first place on the line.
Kruger’s OU teams are 2-2 in games against the Jayhawks played in Norman, including a victory in last year’s regular-season finale, which the Sooners pulled out in a two-point thriller, 75-73. The last two games between Oklahoma and Kansas have been decided by a combined five points, with each team winning on its own home court.