Oklahoma Basketball: Sooners Not a Young Team Any Longer
By Chip Rouse
It’s been easy to rationalize the fall from relevancy of men’s Oklahoma basketball this season as the trials and travails of a young, inexperienced team.
The Sooners may be 9-16 in what has been a highly disappointing season for a team with 11 freshman and sophomores on its roster, but after 25 games, and with plenty of minutes logged by the OU underclassmen, you can’t necessarily consider this a nascent squad any longer.
If the Sooners were young and inexperienced before their senior leader Jordan Woodard went down last weekend with a season- and career-ending ACL injury, they should grow up very quickly over their five remaining regular-season games. Two of those contests take them on the road to Baylor and Kansas, arguably the two best teams in the Big 12 this season and both ranked in the top-10 nationally.
Four of OU’s top four scorers this season are freshman and sophomores, and with virtually everybody back next season, 2017-18 should be a much different picture for Sooner men’s basketball.
Three of Oklahoma’s last five games are on the road, including the next two (at Oklahoma State and Baylor). The Sooners are just 1-5 away from home in Big 12 games, but that one win was a huge one, coming in double overtime against then-top-25-ranked West Virginia.
OU has just one win to show for it, but they have been in most every game they’ve played on the road. The average losing margin of their five Big12 road losses is just under eight points.
Anytime someone with less experience plays in a Big 12 game, it is going to be a big challenge. –Lon Kruger, OU head coach
Sophomore big man, Jamuni McNeace, who had a career game on Tuesday night in the Sooners’ come-from-behind victory over Red River rival Texas, told Tulsa World staff writer Eric Bailey, “I feel like we’ve been playing well on the road. We have to learn how to finish games.
“We were a young team in November and December But its February,” he said. “We’re not young anymore.”
Oklahoma has lost nine games this season by 10 or fewer points and seven by five points or less.
Anytime someone with less experience plays in a Big 12 game, it becomes a huge challenge, says OU head coach Lon Kruger.
“Our young guys are now toward the end of their freshman year,” Kruger says, “so it’s not like they’ve not been through some Big 12 minutes.”