Oklahoma Basketball: Five Reasons Sooners’ Season Ended Monday Night in Seattle
By Chip Rouse
The women’s Oklahoma basketball season did not end the way anyone would have hoped, but it should not take away from another strong season under head coach Sherri Coale that included a third-place finish in Big 12 play and an 18th consecutive NCAA appearance.
Those are achievements that the vast majority of Division I college programs would sign off on in a heartbeat as a highly successful season. At Oklahoma, however, the expectations are a bit higher, and that is because of what Coale has managed to build and sustain at OU in her 21 years at a program that was on the way out when she first took over back in 1996.
Under Coale, OU women’s basketball has produced 10 seasons of 23 or more victories, including this past season, six shared or outright Big 12 championships, three NCAA Tournament Final Fours and nine Sweet 16 appearances. The 2001-02 Oklahoma women’s team was runner-up to national Champion UConn.
Without question an impressive body of work by any standards.
The 2016-17 season for Sooner basketball came to an end on Monday night at Alaska Airlines Arena when the No. 3-seeded Washington Huskies put 108 points on the scoreboard in their home arena and defeated the six-seeded Sooners 108-82.
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Following are five principal reasons why the Oklahoma women fell one win short of a return trip home to Oklahoma City and a cherished spot in the Sweet 16 Round of the 2017 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament:
To begin with, had the Sooners not ended the season with back-to-back blowout losses to Baylor in the regular-season finale and to West Virginia in the quarterfinal round of the Big 12 Championship Tournament, they probably wouldn’t have been shipped to the Far Northwest to face two locale teams in the opening two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, including one, the Washington Huskies, that was playing on its home floor.
Washington’s 108 points was the most given up by the Oklahoma women all season and the most points scored in 2016-17 by the Huskie women’s team, although Washington went over the century mark five other times this season. Two of OU’s last four opponents scored over 100 points.
Washington’s Kelsey Plum, the nation’s scoring leader and No. 1 all-time in Division I women’s basketball in points scored, had her average 30-plus-point night (38, to be exact) in the Huskies’ victory over the Sooners, but she was complemented in the scoring column by four other Washington starters who scored 16 or more points in the game.
Washington made 18 three-point shots in the game, one less than the Huskies’ school record. Those resulting 54 points accounted for half of Washington’s 108 total points. Two different Washington players made six three-pointers each.
OU’s
got into early foul trouble and was forced to sit a good part of the opening half. Coming off a first-round NCAA Tournament victory in which she scored 17 points, grabbed nine rebounds and blocked nine shots, Pierre-Louis did not score her first points in the game until two minutes were gone in the third quarter and finished the game with six points, seven rebounds and four blocks.