Oklahoma Basketball Stat Statement of the Week: Three

There have not been many standout stats on the Oklahoma basketball spreadsheet lately – at least not of the positive variety.

Two weeks ago, the Sooners were the top-ranked team in the country with a record of 20-2 and wins over four top-25 teams. Since then, however, Oklahoma has dropped three of its last four games, two of those losses coming on the road against unranked teams (at Kansas State and at Texas Tech).

And on Saturday, the Crimson and Cream are off to a place that is not known as an elixir for visiting teams looking to get back on a winning track. WVU Coliseum has been a deep dark hole for visiting teams the past three seasons. The Mountaineers are 12-1 there this year and have gone 37-8 at home over that span.

Not only has Oklahoma’s winning percentage been tanking in the last couple of weeks, but so too have the Sooners’ scoring, shooting percentage and rebounding numbers, especially with three-ball proficiency, a category in which Oklahoma still leads the nation despite shooting no better than 33 percent from behind the arc in their past three losses.

That finally brings us around to the central point of this piece and our stat of the week for Sooner basketball: the number 3.

Oklahoma beat the Mountaineers at West Virginia’s in the mountain men’s first season in the Big 12 in 2012-13. That also was Buddy Hield’s freshman season at OU. The Sooners have fallen at WVU the past two seasons, and a year ago it was by a 21-point blowout as Oklahoma experienced travel delays in getting to Morgantown for a January midweek encounter.

Hield badly wants to break that two-game losing string at West Virginia, but even more than that, he is hoping he and his Sooner teammates can put an end to OU’s back-to-back losing effort and not let the past two bad outings turn into three such games.

Oklahoma has not lost three consecutive games since 2012. If the Sooners are going to avoid that happening, they are probably going to have to find a way to get their 3-point shots to start falling more frequently. The alternative is to take the ball inside more, where the percentages are higher as is the probability of drawing a foul and a chance for a 3-point play of another sort.

Another factor that would greatly help the Oklahoma cause is if their top three offensive scoring threats – Hield, Isaiah Cousins and Jordan Woodard – would combine to have big games at the same time. Hield was held to a season-low 16 points at Texas Tech on Wednesday, but Woodard came through with a game-high 25. Against Kansas, Hield banked 24 while Cousins contributed 21. Woodard added 10 against the Jayhawks, but that was below his season average of 13.6.

Think how great it could be if the Sooner Big Three on the offensive end all broke loose in the same game. That would be an unbeatable trifecta no matter where the game was being played. Oh, by the way, Oklahoma is the only Big 12 team with three players in the league’s top 10 in scoring.

Here’s going out on a limb and on record to proclaim that No. 3 Oklahoma’s two-game skid comes to a screeching halt on Saturday against the No. 10 Mountaineers. Three’s charm for the Sooners. Boomer!