OU Basketball: Sooners Join Football Compatriots as Final Four Team
By Chip Rouse
The OU basketball Sooners are one of four teams heading to Houston as participants in college basketball’s coveted Final Four, but Oklahoma is the only school to make the final four-team playoff this season in both football and basketball.
You won’t hear this in most years, but Sooner fans are hoping that this is the year their basketball team goes further on the road to a national championship than their beloved football program.
Being in the national championship discussion is not all that uncommon for school that throughout its history has been dominated by one of the country’s most elite football programs and has won seven national titles in football, but participating for a national crown in basketball is another matter entirely.
In fact – or should we say “fiction” – Sooner legend has it that during Bud Wilkinson’s coaching years at Oklahoma, the popular saying was that the University of Oklahoma was trying to build a reputation that the football team would be proud of.
Oklahoma has won seven national championships in football and has five Heisman Trophy winners, two of them (Jason White in 2003 and Sam Bradford in 2008) on coach Bob Stoops’ watch, the second most in college football history.
In basketball, however, the Sooners have been a participant in the Final Four on four previous occasions, but have never won it all. They came close twice, in 1947 and 2008), but lost in the national championship game. While basketball at OU has not been as widely popular among the passionate Sooner fan base, and has no national titles to its credit, it has produced a National Player of the Year (Blake Griffin in 2009) and likely will have another this season in Buddy Hield.
Much of the credit for the progressive success Oklahoma basketball has enjoyed the past four season belongs with head coach Lon Kruger. Under Kruger’s leadership, the Sooners’ win total in basketball has improved every season since he became head coach in 2011. Beginning with the 2011-12 season, Oklahoma has finished the season with 15, 20, 23, 24 and 29 (and counting) wins, respectively.
Only three Sooners men’s basketball teams in program history have won as many as 30 games in a season. Two of Billy Tubbs’ teams did so (35 in 1987-88 and 30 in 1988-89) and one team under Kelvin Sampson (31 in 2001-02). Two of those teams, Tubbs’ 1987-88 squad and Sampson’s 2001-02 team made it to the Final Four. The 1987-88 Sooner team lost to heavy underdog Kansas in the national title game.
Kruger’s current team, led by unanimous All-American and likely Player of the Year Buddy Hield, is one win way from becoming only the fourth team in Oklahoma basketball history to reach the 30-win level.
Another interesting side note to all the recent success Oklahoma football and basketball are generating is that both head coaches have ties to Kansas State.
Stoops was an assistant under coach Bill Snyder at K-State for seven seasons before leaving to become the defensive coordinator and an assistant at Florida. Kruger played at Kansas State and was a two-time Big Eight Player of the Year in the early 1970s and was an assistant coach there and later head coach for five seasons (1986-90).
Kruger was the coach of the Kansas State team that lost to Kansas in the Midwest Regional final the same season that Oklahoma won the South Regional – coincidentally, with a victory over Villanova, the team the Sooners will face in the national semifinals this weekend – and played the Jayhawks for the national championship.