Five Phrases Oklahoma Basketball Fans Don’t Want to Hear in March
By Chip Rouse
With the regular season racing to the finish line and March Madness right around the corner, Oklahoma basketball fans are gearing up for what they are hopeful will be a lengthy postseason journey.
As the games get more serious and with much more at stake, fans tend to get a lot more sensitive to things they see, hear and read about their favorite team. Generally they savor all the positive comments while scoffing at anything that speaks disparagingly about the school they passionately support.
The Oklahoma Sooners undeniably have been on a magical ride this season. You can see it, hear it and feel it in the fan base. Lloyd Noble Center has been sold out for virtually every game this season – especially after Big 12 play commenced – and that is something that has not happened in quite a few years.
The University of Oklahoma, first and foremost, prides itself as a football school, and with the rich history and performance standards to support that claim. But to be perfectly candid, the dramatic rise of the basketball program this season has exceeded the highly successful football season the Sooners enjoyed in the fall.
And that is saying a lot when compared with a football program that finished fifth in the national rankings and was one of the four teams that participated in college football’s version of the Final Four.
Like the OU men’s basketball team. the Sooner Nation is experiencing a euphoric high post-football this season, courtesy of Buddy Hield and Company, who have provided Sooner fans with an energy and rabid following that hasn’t existed in the Sooner State since the great Oklahoma hoops teams of the 1980s and early ’90s, again in the early 2000s and in 2008-09, when Blake Griffin was named National Player of the Year.
At this point in the season, I can assure you that no Sooner fan wants anything to do with anyone or anything that has less than favorable things to say about Oklahoma basketball. Trust me on this…or you will be forced to suffer the consequences.
It is in that spirit that I share with you the five word pairings or phrases that the Sooner basketball fandom does not want to come across in any way, shape or form for the remainder of this college basketball season:
1) One and done. Twice in Lon Kruger’s three consecutive NCAA appearances as the Oklahoma head coach, the Sooners have been beaten in their first tournament game (this has also happened to other good Oklahoma teams). Last season, Oklahoma made it through the first weekend before losing to Michigan State in the Sweet 16 round. This season, the Sooners are expected to be a high seed entering March Madness, and that’s what OU fans are counting on as well. So the last thing they want to hear about, let alone experience, is how Oklahoma can fall victim to one of those dreaded second-round upsets on the opening weekend of the tournament.
2) Poor shooting leads to Sooner upset. In three of Oklahoma’s five losses this season (all three coming in the month of February), the Sooners have shot 33 percent or worse from the field. All teams experience shooting draughts at some stage of the long season, but this Oklahoma team has Buddy Hield and multiple offensive weapons. So to contemplate any extended shooting woes by this year’s Sooner squad seemed hard to imagine. This is especially so when you have an automatic weapon that fires with such high consistency and accuracy as Hield has in numerous OU wins – and losses (he dropped 46 points on Kansas in a losing effort) -this season. Nevertheless, the Sooners have had some difficulty, including the incomparable Buddy “Buckets,” putting the ball in the basket in recent outings. Against NCAA Tournament opponents, a bad-shooting game will end your season, and that is something that is akin to blasphemy right not to Oklahoma fans.
3) Buddy Hield goes down with an injury. Buddy Hield is the reigning Big 12 Player of the Year and likely to repeat this season. He leads the Big 12 in scoring and is second in the country, averaging 25-plus points per game. He is the best three-point shooter on the nation’s best three-point-shooting team. Fourteen times this season, Hield has scored 25 or more points and eight times that total has exceeded 30 or more. The OU All-American is the heart and soul of this season’s Sooner team. He may not be the leading scorer every night out, but the OU offense definitely ebbs and flows through this four-year starter. With Buddy out of the lineup, this is not the same Oklahoma team, which would have to be the Sooners’ worst nightmare going into the Big Dance.
4) Too many regular-season minutes will leave Sooner starters lifeless in the postseason. Four Oklahoma Sooners (Buddy Hield, Isaiah Cousins, Ryan Spangler and Jordan Woodard have started 95 consecutive games for Oklahoma over the past three seasons. And this season, these same four, along with sophomore Khadeem Lattin have played the majority of minutes in all 26 of the Sooners games thus far. That is a lot of minutes, and the concern is that the rigors of the long season will take its toll on the OU starters at the worst possible time: in the NCAA Tournament, when the stakes are at the highest.
5) Oklahoma’s nation-best three-ball shooting will cost the Sooners in the NCAA Tournament. With Buddy Hield leading the way, OU has lived and thrived on the three-ball throughout the 2015-16 season. Long-term, however, life on the three-point line is far from a high percentage for sustained success. The Sooners’ recently have not enjoyed the same proficiency 19-feet away from the basket that they did the first couple of months of the season. And when half of the shots taken in a game by Oklahoma this season are from behind the arc, that presents a huge problem when the shots aren’t falling. If the Sooners are going to go far in the NCAA Tournament, they are going to have to find more offensive balance, like they did in getting a huge road win at West Virginia, looking first to go inside before settling for what was available out on the perimeter. In that contest, the Sooners scored 32 points in the paint to go with 24 points on three-pointers. That is a formula the Oklahoma should pay closer attention to heading into the postseason.