Oklahoma basketball: Sooners look bad, play worse in 77-66 loss to Texas

Oklahoma basketball hit a new low point for the season on Saturday, as Texas swept the hardwood edition of the Red River rivalry season series with a dominant 77-66 road win over the Sooners.

The Sooners shot a season-low 30.8 percent and never led in the game. It was the fifth straight OU loss and the eighth in the last 10 games. This game was never really in doubt. The Longhorns scored the first five points in the game and were never headed, taking a 32-29 advantage into halftime, with the Sooners shooting just 26 percent in the first half.

Trae Young made just one field goal in seven attempts in the opening half, but was seven of seven at the free-throw line to end the first 30 minutes with nine points.

Oklahoma got within one point, 45-44, in the second half on Young’s first made three-pointer after 20 consecutive misses over three games. But Texas responded with a 12-0 run to open up a 13-point advantage, and the Sooners were never able to recover.

Young finished with a game-high 26 points, scoring 12 of those points in the final seven minutes of the game, but he struggled with his shot throughout most of the game. The nation’s scoring and assist leader delivered seven assists, all coming in the first half.

This was the worst the Sooners have looked all season and was very disappointing after as well as they played, albeit in a losing effort, earlier in the week at Texas Tech. The 66 points is the fewest the nation’s highest-scoring team has produced all season.

Even the presence of Baker Mayfield in the house with his Heisman Trophy in hand wasn’t enough to pull this one out for the Crimson and Cream. It was OU’s second consecutive loss at home after winning its first 11 games of the season at Lloyd Noble Center.

For the first time all season, the capacity crowd at the LNC began filing out of the arena long before the game was over.

Texas did an excellent job of controlling the pace of the game, but more importantly, the Longhorns countered Oklahoma’s horrific shooting performance with a 54.5 field-goal percentage of its own. Junior Dylan Osetkowski was the big gun for Texas with 21 points, including three three-pointers, and 7-foot, 1-inch Mo Bamba corralled a career-high 18 rebounds to lead the Longhorns’ 43-32 rebounding advantage.

Three other Texas starters reached double figures in points. Only one OU player not named Young scored in double digits (Christian James with 11).

The 23rd-ranked Sooners will certainly drop out of the top-25 when next week’s rankings are released. The season sweep of Oklahoma is the first by Texas since 2011-12 in Lon Kruger’s first season at OU. After sitting at 6-3 in the Big 12 on Jan. 30, the Sooners have been in free fall and are now 6-8 in the conference and in danger of dropping all the way to the bottom of the league.

If you believe things couldn’t get any worse for the Sooners, you are sadly mistaken. On Monday night, they have to play at Kansas, where Oklahoma has not won a basketball game in 25 years.