Things have not gone particularly well this season for men’s Oklahoma basketball. The Sooners losing record is just there fourth such season in the past 36 seasons.
In 110 seasons of varsity basketball in five different conferences, Oklahoma has lost more games than it has won just 22 times.
Between 1981-82 and 2008-09, the Sooners put together 28 consecutive winning seasons under the legendary Billy Tubbs and his predecessor, Kelvin Sampson.
The latest sub-.500 season should be just a one-year thing under head coach Lon Kruger, who is a master architect of rebuilding college programs. He’s already done so at Oklahoma, turning around a team he inherited from Jeff Capel that finished one game under .500 in Kruger’s inaugural season in Norman. That same team improved to 20-12 the next year and increased its winning total every year for the next three, peaking a 29 a year ago.
Oklahoma’s worst stretch of non-winning seasons in program history in the 1950s and ’60s, when the Sooners lost more than they won in six consecutive seasons, from 1951-52 through 1956-57. Following three winning years between 1957-60, in the first three seasons of the Big Eight Conference, OU slumped to seven more losing seasons.
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In 31 seasons as a college head coach, Kruger has finished below .500 just eight times. Outside of his first three seasons as a head coach, at Pan-American in the mid-1980s, Kruger’s teams have never gone back-to-back years with losing records.
Oklahoma played this season with 11 freshmen and sophomores on its roster. Because of that, OU’s young stars saw plenty of playing time this season. In fact, more than 70 percent of the Sooners’ offensive production this season has come from first- and second-year players.
The Sooners have all of their key contributors and all of the starters at season’s end returning next season. In addition they bring in the No. 2 point guard in the national 2017 recruiting class, Trae Young, who ended up selecting OU over Kansas. The Jayhawks were hoping to lure the Norman, Okla., five-star recruit to replace Frank Mason, who is a strong contender for national player of the year this season.
The bottom line is, the Sooners should be much improved next season. Not only should they make a big jump in the win column, but you can expect to see the Oklahoma men make a big rise in the league standings, as well. They should be legitimate conference contenders by this time next season.