The Sooner basketball win total reached 16 with OU’s victory over 13th ranked Baylor on Saturday.
That is the best record by an Oklahoma men’s basketball team since the Sooners went 25-1 before losing a second time in the 2008-09 campaign, Blake Griffin’s final season in an OU uniform. The win at Baylor also moved Oklahoma back into first place in the Big 12 standings, a position it currently shares with three other conference teams.
Buddy Hield scored only five points in the opening half at Baylor as a result of being charged with his second personal foul 11 minutes into the game, but Jordan Woodard picked up the slack in the absence of the Big 12 leading scorer, putting in 15 of his game-high 20 points in the first 20 minutes. Fifteen of his 20 points came from hitting 5 of 8 behind the three-point arc.
It marked the fourth time this season that the Woodard, the Sooners junior point guard, has reached the 20-point level and the ninth time in 18 games he has scored 15 or more points in a game.
Here are five more fun facts you should takeaway from the Sooners win over Baylor:
- Buddy Hield’s 19 points was seven points below his season average, but it was enough for him to pass former OU star Hollis Price on the Oklahoma career scoring list. Hield now has 1,828 points in his Sooner career. Price was in seventh place with 1,821 points, but now drops to the eighth spot behind Hield.
- With a 10-point win over Baylor, which easily could have been more (the Sooners led by as many as 24 points deep into the second half), Oklahoma is the only team that has held the No. 1 national ranking this season that has a double-digit victory over a top-15 team.
- Thirteen of Baylor’s 16 turnovers in the game came from Oklahoma ball thievery. The Sooners had a season-high 13 steals in the game, led by four from Jordan Woodard. Isaiah Cousins, Dante Buford and Buddy Hield had two apiece.
- Oklahoma’s 62-percent shooting from the field was a season high for the Sooners, who made 31 of their 50 field-goal attempts. OU was 16 out of 28 from three-point range, a percentage of 57 percent, also a Sooner season high. The 16 treys was one less than their total earlier in the week at Iowa State. In the last two games, Oklahoma, the best three-point-shooting team in the country based on percentage, has made 33 of 60 beyond the arc.
- The Sooners 31 made field goals in the Baylor game came off of 29 assists, another season high for OU. That assist total was one less than the all-time Big 12 record for a single game. Texas Tech had 30 assists in a game in February of 2012, ironically against Baylor.