Oklahoma basketball: Look who’s sitting atop the Big 12 standings
By Chip Rouse
The top two teams in the Big 12 fell from the unbeaten ranks this past week, the result of which leaves Oklahoma basketball sitting on top of the conference standings heading into the conference season.
No. 1 Kansas lost at Arizona State on Saturday and No. 12 Texas Tech lost in midweek in a close game with No. 2 Duke. With that, the Sooners jumped to the front of the class, if only temporarily, at 11-1.
Not to be a glass-half-empty grinch type at this most festive time of year, but Oklahoma’s reward for climbing to the top of the Big 12 standings is an expense paid trip to Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence, Kansas, one of the meccas of college basketball, the second day of the new year and a daunting date with what is certain to be an angry Kansas Jayhawk squad.
Six days later the Sooners will find themselves at Texas Tech. No one has a more difficult start to the conference season than Oklahoma.
Oklahoma Sooners
OU’s 11-1 start to the 2018-19 season is eerily similar to last year, when the Sooners began the season 12-1, including a 10-game winning streak, before dropping a road game at West Virginia the first week in January. Sadly, that was the high point of the season for the Trae Young-led Sooners.
Oklahoma went 6-12 the remainder of the season and tied for next-to-last place in the league standings.
The good news is this Sooners team appears to be much different from last year’s group. For one thing, the offense is more balanced and deep than a year ago, but the big difference is on the defensive end. Last season, OU allowed its opponents 81.7 points a game. This year, through a dozen games, the Sooners’ opponents are averaging just 65.8 points a contest.
The Sooners are tied for seventh best in the country in field goal percentage defense, holding opponents to 37.5 percent from the field. Last season Oklahoma’s opponents shot nearly 50 percent from the field.
So enjoy OU’s terrific start through the nonconference portion of the 2018-19 season. We should know fairly quick how sustainable and happy the new year will be for men’s Oklahoma basketball. I’ll go on record now saying this is a better team and is destined to be a better year than what things appeared to be at this same time a year ago.