Oklahoma basketball: Sooners sweep Big 12 honors two weeks in a row

Through the first seven weeks of the season, Big 12 Player of the Week honors have been all about Oklahoma basketball.

For the second consecutive week, a pair of Oklahoma freshman have been awarded Big 12 Player of the Week honors. It is the first time in the 22-year-history of the Big 12 Conference that two players from the same school have swept both weekly conference awards in two consecutive weeks.

The Sooners’ Trae Young is the Big 12 Player of the Week and teammate Brady Manek is the Newcomer of the Week in the conference. Both are true freshmen.

And it gets even better: In the seven weeks that the conference has named a Player of the Week and a Newcomer of the Week for the 2017-18 season, an Oklahoma player has been one of the two players honored in six of the first seven weeks.

Given all that true freshman superman Young has accomplished in just 11 career college games, the Big 12 just might consider etching his name permanently on its weekly honor roll.

This is Young’s fourth Big 12 Player of the Week award this season, and in two other weeks he was named Newcomer of the Week. The freshman point guard’s play in the month of December has been nothing short of phenomenal. Last week alone, Young averaged 28.5 points, which is right on his nation-best season average, 17.0 assists and 58-percent shooting from behind the three-point line (11 for 19).

Young’s week’s work included leading the way to two Oklahoma wins by an average scoring margin of 31 points. In the Sooners’ 105-68 win over Northwestern State, the former five-star recruit fired in 26 points along with dishing out 22 assists, making him just the fourth player in college football history to record that many dimes in a single game.

Manek, who like Young hails from the state of Oklahoma, scored a career-high 22 points and followed that up with an 11-point outing in the Sooners wins last week over Northwestern State and Northwestern. He connected on six of nine three-point shots in the two games combined.

The outstanding play of their two starting freshmen is a big reason why Oklahoma is off to a 10-1 start and its second best start to a season under head coach Lon Kruger, who is in his seventh year at OU.