Lon Kruger: ‘It Was a Tough Win; Nothing Pretty About It’
By Chip Rouse
Oklahoma head coach Lon Kruger has been through the wars before, many of them, both as a player and a coach.
He, as much as anybody, knows that sometimes you just have to grind it out and resort to winning ugly.
Everyone who expected former No. 1 Oklahoma to come out firing from the hip after experiencing one of its worst offensive games of the season in a loss at Kansas State on Saturday was greatly disappointed, and right from the start, on Monday night.
The Sooners were down by ten, 13-3, in the opening four minutes of the game as Texas was the one that came out firing, hitting four of its first five shots. So very early, it appeared that what had happened to Oklahoma on Saturday was happening again, and this time before the OU home crowd and another national television audience.
Oklahoma was able to fight its way back in the contest, but the home team still trailed at halftime by nine points. OU went on a 9-3 run to open the second half, but did not hold its first lead in the game until almost 38 and a half minutes had elapsed. And that was only because the odds-on favorite to win National Player of the Year, All-American Buddy Hield, outscored Texas 12-4 over the final three minutes of the game.
It was a contest very reminiscent of the Sooners two-point win over LSU a couple of weekends back. OU did not garner its first lead in that game until very late in the contest. Oklahoma pulled that one out at the end, as well, and it was Hield who put the Sooners on his back and carried them to the win – along with a game-winning score by Isaiah Cousins – in that one.
Oklahoma has displayed the confidence and the moxy all season of a team that could get to the Final Four and even win it all. And those intangibles come from their head coach.
“They (the OU coaches) always keep our confidence up,” Hield told reporters after the game with Texas. “Coach (Kruger) does a good job of keeping us together no matter what we go through. Texas had us down the whole game by five, six, and we cut it down to two and try to tie it up and they go up by five again. So Coach kept us together as one group. We never break and were able to pull it out the last few minutes.”
After the game, Kruger had this to say about his team and the win: “Tonight was a hard battle. We were fighting uphill all night, and credit Texas, they got off to a good start and played really well. They made it tough on us on the offensive end.
“For the most part, both teams took away the other’s offensive flow. We were able to get some transition buckets there in the second half. It just became a contest of attacking off the dribble and trying to make plays for each other.
“There was nothing pretty about it,” the Sooner head coach said, “but sometimes you just have to throw the gloves down and attack.”
And attack they did. Sooners in a split decision. Texas came into the game as the 24th-ranked team in this week’s Associated Press polhttps://stormininnorman.com/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=36880&type=image&TB_iframe=1&width=753&height=482l. With the win, Oklahoma has now won five of seven games against top-25 teams this season.
There’s no rest for the wicked, as they say. Another ranked opponent, No. 6 Kansas, winners over previously league leader West Virginia, rolls into Lloyd Noble Center for a bout with the Sooners on Saturday. It will be a rematch of what some believe was the game of the season in college basketball. The Jayhawks prevailed 109-106 in triple overtime. Hield had a career- and season-high in that one exploding for 46 points.