A halftime lead is generally a good thing, and in the case of OU basketball this season, it has been a great thing.
There is no question that leading at the break in college basketball is a momentum lift as teams head to the locker rooms to re-evaluate and make adjustments for the second half. Of course, holding on to an advantage at the end of 20 minutes is no guarantee of a successful outcome at game’s end. Much can happen in the second half to alter the ultimate outcome of a game, for good and bad.
Several factors have contributed to Oklahoma’s strong team performance this season, and one that rarely gets cited in the perfunctory breakdown of the game statistics is the ability to maintain a halftime advantage, however small, and finish what you started all the way through to the end. I’m not speaking about never trailing in a game, but rather the ability and resilience necessary to take an opponent’s best punch and finish, especially late in games when the ultimate outcome is very much in doubt.
It is pretty clear, looking at the complete body of work of OU men’s basketball this season, that this Sooner team is virtually unbeatable when it gets off to a fast start and has the lead going into halftime.
The Sooners are 22-5 on the season and ranked 4th in the country this week. In 18 of those 27 games, Oklahoma led at the half and it has won 17 of them. The lone loss came in the triple-overtime game at Kansas, in which the Sooners held a 44-40 lead at the break in the game many college basketball observers bill as the game of the year this season in college hoops.
Conversely, the Sooners have trailed at the half eight times this season, and they went on to lose four of those games, coming from behind to win over Harvard, Iowa State and Texas at home and at LSU in the Big 12-SEC Challenge. One game, at home vs. West Virginia, the score was tied at the half, and the Sooners went on to win by a single bucket on a buzzer-beating tip in by Khadeem Lattin.
The other factor of note is that when Oklahoma owns the halftime lead and begins the game shooting better than 40 percent from the field, it has been an especially strong indicator of a Sooner victory.
In Oklahoma’s four-game swoon in mid-February, the team shot atypically poorly in the early going, putting the Sooners behind, on their heels and in a hole they were never able to dig out of the rest of the game.