Oklahoma Basketball: One Seed,Two Seed – What’s the Difference?
By Chip Rouse
Depending on which college basketball expert you follow or believe in the most, Oklahoma basketball is projected as a one or a two seed looking out to the horizon and NCAA Tournament Selection Sunday.
That is a nice luxury to have when you stop and think about it. After all, it hasn’t been that many seasons that there weren’t concerns about the Sooners even making the Big Dance and, even then, something lower than a five seed was the reality.
Head coach Lon Kruger is the best in the college game in taking teams to the NCAA Tournament. He is the only coach in college basketball history to have taken five different teams to the tournament, including a Final Four appearance with Florida in 1994.
This will be the fourth season the veteran coach has led Oklahoma to an NCAA Tournament appearance, and that is plenty O.K. with the Sooner Nation, which is used to playing big postseason games in football, but not so much in its basketball history.
Since shortly after climbing into the top five in the college rankings in early January, Oklahoma has been a projected Final Four contender and a lead candidate for one of the top seeds in this year’s NCAA Tournament. Even after losing three of four games in February, the Sooners have been the choice of several experts who make a living projecting the tourney bracket and seedings throughout the season as one of the No. 1 seeds.
The biggest worry among OU basketball fans during the team’s rocky stretch this month – aside, of course, from whether the Sooners could dethrone the perennial conference champion Kansas Jayhawks at the top of the Big 12 standings – was if, after every February loss, Oklahoma would fall out as a projected postseason No. 1 seed.
Thanks to all the parity that reigns this season in college basketball, Oklahoma remains on the top line of Mr. Bracketology himself, ESPN’s resident NCAA Tournament expert, Joe Lunardi. Over the past month, though, the Sooners have gone from the No. 1 overall seed, to No. 3 overall and, this week, No. 4 among the four projected No. 1 seeds. So seemingly there is little margin of error left if Oklahoma is going to remain on the top line.
No sooner had we gotten the previous sentence out of our head and onto this page than two of the four projected NCAA top seeds went down to defeat this week. Virginia, which had just moved onto Lunardi’s top line this week, lost on Monday to Miami (Fla.), and overall top seed Villanova lost at Xavier on Wednesday night.
That ostensibly leaves Kansas and Oklahoma out of the Big 12 back where they were back on Jan. 6 at one and two or, at worst, one and three among Lunardi’s projected top four – for the moment, at least.
The Sooners still have to successfully navigate Austin, Texas, and No. 25 Texas on Saturday, or all bets are off…once again.
Having made much to do about this, though, realistically speaking, if you are able to end the season as one of the top eight teams in the eyes of OU athletic director Joe Castiglione’s NCAA Tournament Selection Committee (Castiglione is the chairman of the committee this season) and earn a one of two seed in the tournament brackets, does it really matter all that much?
Even if the Sooners were to fall to the two line come time for March Madness, they still will have to go through four other teams in the bracket, including, in all probability the No. 1 team, to make it to the Final Four. That would likely happen regardless of whether they are the one or the two seed.
It becomes a little more dicey if you are a three or four seed in the Big Dance, but Oklahoma would have to run off the rails, in my opinion, in its final three regular-season games (at Texas, Baylor and at TCU) and, perhaps, lose in its opening game in the Big 12 Tournament to drop to the three or four line when the Selection Committee fills the brackets for real on Sunday, March 13.
Until then, OU fans, wait, watch and keep your fingers crossed.