Oklahoma Basketball: What We Learned From the Baylor Battle Scars

I’m not sure anyone with any sense of reality expected the Sooners the play Baylor as close as they did on Tuesday night, but credit to Oklahoma basketball for hanging in the game as long as it did.

We’re talking about the 9-17 Sooners and the No. 9-ranked Baylor Bears at Baylor in a game that meant much more to Baylor than it did to Oklahoma. The Sooners hung with the Bears for a large portion of the second stanza, but finally succumbed to the more experienced, more talented Baylor team, 60-54.

At the very least, Oklahoma played much better on Tuesday night in Waco than it did in the earlier contest between the two teams on the Sooners’ home floor, won by Baylor 76-50 in runaway fashion.

The Bears led by as many as 15 points early in the first half, and were up by 14 in the first five minutes after intermission. A perfect time for the young Sooners to give in and concede, only that is not their nature.

The Sooners appeared to be the more confused team in the early going, and at several times in the opening 20 minutes it looked like Baylor was going to run away and bury Oklahoma like they did earlier in the season.

Baylor shot 43 percent in the first half, while the Sooners struggled to put the ball in the basket, firing at just a 29-percent clip, in large part because of strong defensive play by the Bears and their size and strength advantage in the paint.

Several OU players commented to reporters after the game that Baylor made it extremely tough to drive to the basket and get off clean shots because of the Bears’ rim protectors down low.

“Defensively, in the second half, we battled much better, just had trouble getting the shots to go.” –OU head coach Lon Kruger

The Sooners toughened up defensively after the intermission and fought their way back into the game, cutting the Baylor advantage down to two points with under 10 minutes to go, courtesy of a 21-8 scoring run.

They could get no closer, however, as the OU offense ran hot and cold, and mostly on the cold side, from that point forward, reminiscent of the entire season for this young group of Sooners.

Here are the key takeaways from OU’s 18th loss of the season and 16th in the last 19 games:

• Kameron McGusty again led the Sooners in scoring with 13 points, his 15th consecutive game in double figures. That is the most by any Big 12 freshman this season, including super-frosh Josh Jackson of Kansas.
• Oklahoma turned the ball over just nine times, a season best. OU won the turnover battle 13-9.
• Forty-eight of the Sooners’ 54 points were scored by freshmen and sophomores. That is a troublesome stat as far as the current season is concerned, but a good stat looking to the future.
• Since leading scorer Jordan Woodard went down four games ago with a season-ending knee injury, the Oklahoma bench has averaged over 30 points a game, according to information provided by the OU athletic department. Sooners reserves scored 19 points Tuesday night.
• Despite Baylor’s size advantage at the rim, the Bears only managed six more points in the paint than the Sooners (28-22).
• Oklahoma led for just 23 seconds in the game, and that came at the very beginning on a three-point play by Rashard Odomes that gave the Sooners a 3-2 lead.