Oklahoma Basketball on Rebound: Same Old, Same Old for Sooners
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma basketball season is beginning to seem a lot like the movie “Ground Hog Day.” The same old story keeps repeating itself over and over.
The Sooners were up by nine points in both halves on Tuesday night at TCU and, again, could not get the job done at the end. OU lost the ball game 60-57 and, as a result, the Sooners’ season record dropped to 6-7 and below .500 for the first time since Lon Kruger’s first season in 2011-12.
Moreover, the Sooners are 0-2 in Big 12 play and likely to keep falling if they aren’t able to find a way to stop the hemorrhage they’ve opened with five straight losses very soon.
Coach Lon Kruger’s squad has developed a serious problem of building second-half advantages and then dropping out of sight in the critical closing minutes of game. It hasn’t happened just once or twice, it has occurred in more than half of OU’s seven losses this season.
On Tuesday night in Ft. Worth, Oklahoma led TCU 48-39 with just over 14 minutes remaining in the game. From that point forward, the Horned Frogs outscored the Sooners 21-9 triggered by a 12-0 TCU run at a critical juncture in the game.
The team that finished last season with a Final Four appearance now occupies last place in the Big 12 through all games and is tied with in-state rival in conference play, both with two losses in the same number of games.
We know this team is going to continue to get better as we go along. There is too much untapped talent on the roster not to improve the level of play.
To say that the Sooner men’s squad is a very young team is a major understatement. Eleven of the 16 players on this year’s 16-man roster are freshman or sophomores. And without senior guard and team leader Jordan Woodard on the floor, OU is missing four of the five starters that led OU to the Final Four last season.
Forty-one of Oklahoma’s 57 points in the loss Tuesday night at TCU were by freshman and sophomores.
“I liked our production for 35 minutes…We’ll get better from this…We’ve got a lot of things to work on.” –Lon Kruger, OU head coach
Woodard has missed the last three games, all Sooner losses, with what was initially described as a groin pull. Although, the exact reason for his absence the last two games has not been made known, other than to say that his timetable for return to the lineup is unknown.
Oklahoma definitely needs its leading scorer and four-year starter in action to win in one of the country’s top two basketball conferences. In the last two games Woodard has missed, the Sooners have not even reached 60 points. In those two conference losses, Oklahoma has averaged over 20 points below its season average.
Kruger is an excellent head coach and he has the resume to back that up, He is doing his best to show patience with his young squad and certainly hasn’t created any false expectations with this bunch. Having said that, though, Sooner fans are probably getting a little tired of hearing the same old song in Kruger’s comments after each game.
“I liked our production for 35 minutes, but TCU did a great job down the stretch,” the Sooner head coach said after the TCU game. “We’ll get better from this…We’ve got a lot of things to work on…We’ve got a group that will continue to work at it.”
Frankly, unless that improvement starts to take hold pretty darn quick, I don’t see this Sooner squad winning more than four or five conference games, if that many, this season.
The Sooners are last or next to last in both scoring offense and defense, field-goal percentage offense and defense, rebounding margin and assists. That’s not going to win you many games in a league as highly competitive as the Big 12.
Looking ahead on the schedule, I don’t see much hope that things are going to get much better in terms of wins and losses. The Sooners next five games are against Kansas State, Kansas, Texas Tech, West Virginia and Iowa State. Kansas, Texas Tech and Iowa State are at home, but that might not make much difference the way OU is playing right now.
The combined record of the Sooners’ next five conference opponents is 58-11.
By the time Oklahoma State comes to Norman for Bedlam on the next to last day of January, Oklahoma could be looking at an 0-7 record in the conference or, at best (let’s be honest), 2-5.
There haven’t been very, very few of those kind of season starts in Oklahoma men’s basketball in nearly four decades, and thank goodness for that.