Oklahoma basketball: Five things to know from 2017-18 Season
By Chip Rouse
As legendary author Charles Dickens might write about the 2017-18 Oklahoma basketball season: “It was the best of times and the worst of times.”
Taking that literary analogy a step further, men’s Sooner basketball was a tale of two seasons in 2017-18. The 2017 part was out of this world. The second half of the season – the part that fell in 2018 – was the polar opposite.
The 2017 calendar year ended with Oklahoma sporting a 10-1 record, including two wins over top-25 teams. Once the calendar turned over to 2018, however, the Sooners fortunes on the hardwood took a drastic turn for the worse. Over the final 74 days of the OU men’s basketball season, Oklahoma won eight more times and lost 13, including 10 of its final 13 games.
The Sooners ended up with a seven-game improvement over the previous season and a return appearance in the NCAA Tournament, but the feeling at the end of this season wasn’t all that different from a year ago, when Oklahoma closed out the 2016-17 season with 11 losses in its final 14 games.
The brutal truth is that the Oklahoma men’s basketball team this past season, even with the nation’s leading scorer, wasn’t as good as everyone was led to believe early on.
So what happens going forward and what did we learn from the roller-coaster ride that was Oklahoma basketball in 2017-18?