Oklahoma Basketball: Six Shining Sooner Moments From 2015-16 Season
By Chip Rouse
Buddy Hield’s 37 Points Sinks Ducks and Sends Oklahoma to Final Four
After the loss to Michigan State in the Sweet 16 of the 2015 NCAA Tournament, the Oklahoma players to a man vowed not to let that happen if they were fortunate enough to make it past the opening weekend of the tournament the following season.
The Sooners earned a No. 2 seed entering this year’s NCAA Tournament, which already represented an improvement over their No. 3 seed of the preceding year.
Behind Buddy Hield’s 27 points, Oklahoma outlasted Cal State-Bakersfield in its opening tournament game, and the Naismith and Wooden Award winner trumped that with a 37-point outing in the Sooners’ 85-81 victory over Virginia Commonwealth, earning OU a return trip to the round of 16 the following weekend.
As sensational as Hield was in Oklahoma’s opening two March Madness victories this season, leading all tournament scorers and averaging 32 points a game, his best was yet to come.
Hield was held to just 17 points in the Sooners’ Sweet 16 contest with Texas A&M. He was OU’s leading rebounder in the game, with 10 boards, but atypically not the team’s high scorer. That didn’t matter, though, because Jordan Woodard picked up the slack with a 22-point game, and the Sooners blew things wide open with a 19-4 run in the first half that opened up a 19-point advantage from which the third-seeded Aggies never recovered.
Their goal of a year earlier now accomplished, the Sooners advanced to the West Regional final to face the region’s top seed, the Oregon Ducks.
Oregon knew what it had to do to win and advance: Run Hield off the three-point line, deny him the ball and make him have to work for every shot. Simple enough – but in theory only. The Sooner All-American wasted little time in destroying Oregon’s game plan, scoring 11 of Oklahoma’s first 15 points in the game and connecting on each of his first three three-point shots.
Hield went on to score as many points in the opening half against Oregon (17) as he did in the entire game in OU’s Sweet 16 triumph over Texas A&M. He buried five three balls in the opening 20 minutes, the last of which came with the play clock and the game clock running down to end the half to give Oklahoma a commanding 48-30 win at the break.
As it turned out, Hield’s first-half performance was just the warm-up act. The player they affectionately refer to as “Buddy Buckets” started out the second half just as he had ended the opening 20 minutes.
Hield scored 9 of OU’s first 11 points to open the second half and went on to add 13 more, including three more dagger-in-the-heart three-pointers giving him a total of eight treys in the game, to finish with a total of 39 points, or nearly half of the Sooners’ scoring for the game.
His 39-point output represented his highest scoring game in regulation in the 2015-16 season and for his career, and sent the Sooners to their fifth Final Four appearance in school history and first since 2009. Enjoy some of the highlights from OU’s decisive win in this video.
Unfortunately, Hield’s sensational season and college career came to a crushing conclusion in Oklahoma’s next game. He was held to just nine points, and the Sooners’ just 51 total, in a devastating 44-point loss to Villanova, which went on to best North Carolina for the national championship