Oklahoma Basketball: What Went Wrong at Kansas State?
By Chip Rouse
Kansas State has been a death trap for Oklahoma basketball for three years running, and on Saturday the unranked Wildcats got the best of the Sooners once again.
Top-ranked Oklahoma lost a fourth straight game against K-State at Bramlage Coliseum, and it was the fourth straight loss for Lon Kruger when playing his alma mater back at his old stomping grounds, where he was a two-time Big Eight Player of the Year when playing for the Kansas State in the early 1970s.
Oklahoma won in the Little Apple in Kruger’s first season as the Sooners’ head coach in 2012, but his team has not won since at K-State, and OU’s 80-69 loss on Saturday was by the widest margin in Kruger’s five seasons at Oklahoma.
The nation’s best three-point shooting team connected on just 6 of 24 three-point attempts for a season-low 25 percent, and that proved to be all Kansas State needed to pull off the upset of the No. 1 Sooners and the Wildcats’ first win over a No. 1 team since defeating top-ranked Kansas in 2012. It was the fifth time in 18 tries in K-State’s history that the Cats have taken down the No. 1 team in college basketball.
What went wrong for Oklahoma in this game:
- The 19-3 Sooners jumped out to a 9-0 advantage in the game and led for most of the first half, but a Kansas State 11-2 run at the end of the opening 20 minutes put the Wildcats up 38-32 at the intermission.
- Oklahoma opened up the second half on a 13-3 run to take a four-point lead at 45-41 four minutes into the second half. That was short-lived, however, as K-State mounted a comeback and regained the lead for good at the 13:01 mark in the second half. The Sooners never got closer than three points over the final 10 minutes of the game.
- Kansas State shot 53 percent from the field, and 61 percent in the first half, almost 10 percent above its season average. Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s 43-percent shooting was below the Sooners’ season average, a credit to the K-State defense.
- Oklahoma was averaging a nation-best 46-percent three-point shooting coming into the game with Kansas State and had made 10 or more treys in 15 of its 21 outings this season. Against K-State OU made just 6 of 24 three-balls for a season-worst 25 percent and connected on just 1 of 9 in the second half, the one coming from Buddy Hield 90 seconds into the second half.
- The Sooners outscored the Wildcats 38-34 in points in the paint, 26-14 in points off of turnovers and 15-0 in fast-break points, but Kansas State outscores the Sooners by a whopping 32-10 points from the reserves.
- Lon Kruger after the game: “We got beat by a club that out-fought us. They were more energetic to loose balls, more active and I thought all night long they were a little quicker. If you don’t play well, get out-fought, you’re not going to win in the Big 12.”
- Jordan Woodard, the Sooners’ No. 2 scorer on the season, averaging over 16 points a game, and up until last week was the No. 1 three-point shotmaker in the country based on percentage, was held scoreless on just six shot attempts and missed all four of his three-point attempts.
- The 69 points scored by the Sooners, a team that has scored 80 or more 15 times in 2015-15, was their lowest offensive output of the season. Their previous low-water mark was 74 points in a two-point win at Oklahoma State. Kansas State reached the 80-point level for the eighth time in the fifth time in 23 games this season. The Wildcats are 7-1 in those games.