The Final Four pairings are set, and for Oklahoma basketball, it means a second meeting this season against Villanova.
The Las Vegas oddsmakers like Villanova in this matchup – largely, I suspect, because of the way they shut down a very good Kansas team in the South Regional championship game to reach the Final Four. The fact that the Jayhawks, 11-time defending Big 12 champions, beat Oklahoma twice twice during the regular season is yet another plus in the Villanova column.
Quite a few of the sports radio talk-show personalities I’ve listened to this week, as well as a good sum of the writers I’ve followed in the print and social media worlds, also appear to be slanting toward Villanova as the choice to move out of the national semifinals and face North Carolina in the winner-take-all national championship game on Monday.
I recognize that only the Oklahoma and Villanova players and coaches will decide who wins on Saturday, but I am more than a bit taken back that everyone seems to be dismissing or severely discounting the outcome of the earlier game this season between the same two teams. Both teams were ranked in the top-10 at the time, and as a reminder, the Sooners won the game, played on a neutral court in Honolulu, Hawaii, by a resounding 23 points (78-55).
Yes, it is true that the game was played very early in the season (Dec. 3), and both teams are much different now than they were then. But to say or believe that Villanova is much improved now and that Oklahoma is not playing better, as well, is faulty reasoning, not to mention inaccurate.
I do believe that the experience and comaraderie of the Sooner starters (four of whom who, in early December, had started for Oklahoma in close to 70 consecutive games) was a huge factor in OU’s second-half dominance in that game, but to suggest that Villanova is in a better position now to beat Oklahoma because they have already played them this season is more wishful than anything approaching certainty.
To illustrate my point, Oklahoma and Kansas played a triple-overtime thriller at Kansas, right after the turn of the calendar in early January, in a contest that many experts believe rates as the best game of the season in college basketball. The Jayhawks eventually won the game by three points, but it easily could have gone either way. The Sooners’ Buddy Hield scored 46 points and was sensational in that game.
Most everyone felt that, because OU played Kansas so well in the game in Lawrence, the Sooners would square the season series when the return game in the Big 12’s round-robin schedule took place on the Sooners’ home court. But that didn’t happen. Kansas turned away Oklahoma in Norman, although the game was close all the way to the end.
An even better example might be Duke and Wisconsin last season. The Blue Devils defeated the Badgers by 10 points in early Dec. 2014 as part of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge Series. Those same two teams met again, nearly four months later, in the NCAA Tournament national championship game. Having played each other earlier in the season, both teams knew each other. but it did not necessarily give either team an advantage over the other in the rematch.
Duke won the rematch – and the national title as a result – but this time by just a six-point margin.
I grant you this: Villanova is clearly a much better team that the 23-point loss to Oklahoma in the earlier game. The Wildcats kept launching three-point shots, particularly in the second half, and missing them (4 for 32 for the game). The Sooners were much more proficient in their three-point tries, hitting 8 of 12 in the opening half and 14 of 26 (54 percent), for the game. Consequently, Oklahoma won big.
I look for the rematch between these two Final Four teams to be much closer than the first affair. My outlook for the OU-Villanova game on Saturday in Houston is very comparable to the way I saw Oklahoma-Oregon in the regional final: a pick’em game that could easily go either way.
The team that makes the most shots, gets the most stops at the other end and protects the basketball the best will win the game and advance to Monday night. Fairly fundamental, but solid fundamentals is what gets the job done at this point in the season.
I’m sticking with the Crimson and Cream and picking Oklahoma to be that team by a score of 72-66. I will even go a step further and project that the Sooners’ Buddy Hield will play well, but won’t be the difference maker in the game.