Oklahoma Basketball: Sooners Put Scare in No. 1 Kansas

The odds were very much against a young and struggling Oklahoma basketball team going into Allen Field House on Senior Night and the final home game of the season and coming out with a win against top-ranked Kansas.

If you did not see the game on ESPN’s “Big Monday” broadcast and just saw the final score, you would not be at all surprised to learn that Kansas won the game and by a 10-point margin, 73-63.

The Jayhawks did win the game, but it did not come nearly as easily as one might suspect from a team with 16 more wins on the season and 15 fewer losses than the freshman and sophomore-laden Oklahoma squad and 15 consecutive home wins over the Sooners.

Kansas has had plenty of imperfect games in what has been another highly successful college basketball season, but you would be hard pressed to find one in which they played as badly as they did in the first 30 minutes of Monday night’s highly emotional game against Oklahoma.

The Sooners led for most of the opening half, although the first-half ended in a 28-all deadlock. Oklahoma came out hot on the offensive end to open the second half, and 10 minutes in the Sooners had stretched their lead out to 12 points, at 54-42.

The more experienced and talented Jayhawks had been at this point before this season, and unfortunately for the visitors, so too had the Sooners.

With Oklahoma leading 54-42 at the 10:12 mark in the second half, Kansas mounted one of its patented scoring runs. Over the next five minutes, the Jayhawks hit nearly every field-goal shot they attempted, virtually the exact opposite of what was happening throughout much of the opening 20 minutes.

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Kansas went on a 22-4 scoring run that erased the 12-point OU advantage and put the Jayhawks up by six. Fifteen of those 22 points came on five three-point field goals (three by Devonte Graham and two by Lagerald Vick. Between them, Graham and Vick fired bulleyes on seven of 12 three-balls. During that span of time, the Jayhawks hit nine consecutive field-goal attempts.

As has happened in way too many games this season, Oklahoma began to unravel and failed to get shots to fall in the game’s final eight to ten minutes, and by that time in the contest, Kansas was primed to pounce.

The Sooners led for over 25 minutes in one of the most difficult road environments in the country, but Kansas led for the most important minutes, the final six.

Kansas committed an uncharacteristic 19 turnovers, one of the factors that allowed Oklahoma to gain and own the lead for as long as it did. The Sooners also outscored the Jayhawks in the paint (30-26), exposing one of Kansas’ few weaknesses in an otherwise well-balanced attack.

Kameron McGusty returned to double digits in the scoring column with 14 points, the 16th time in the last 17 games he has reached double figures. Kristian Doolitte and Khadeem Lattin each added a dozen.

Next: Playing at Kansas Has been House of Horrors for Sooners

Frank Mason III led Kansas, as he has all season, with a game-high 23 points, most of which came at critical points in the game. Graham contributed 16 and super-freshman Josh Jackson, the No. 1 recruit in the country a year ago, had 11.