Oklahoma basketball: Sooners’ trying to avoid ‘deja vu all over again’

The men’s Oklahoma basketball team took the court in Austin on Saturday wearing their new-this-year, coal-colored, gray alternate uniforms.

Unfortunately, that color is symbolic of the direction the Sooners season has taken since the calendar turned over to a new year at the beginning of January and the start of Big 12 play.

A year ago, the Trae Young-led Sooners raced out to a 12-1 record to begin the season and caught everyone in college basketball by surprise. Oklahoma even got off to a great start in conference play a year ago with a record of 4-2 through the first third of the Big 12 season.

Head coach Lon Kruger’s Sooners surprised everyone again this season, charging out to an 11-1 record in the nonconference schedule and breaking into the top-25 to begin the new year.

In the month of January, however, Oklahoma has run into some rough water, going just 2-4 against Big 12 opponents. Granted, four of OU’s six conference opponents so far are either ranked currently Kansas and Texas Tech) or were ranked to begin the season (Kansas State and TCU).

Oklahoma is in the midst of a two-game losing skid, suffering losses to Kansas State and Texas over the last five days. The loss to K-State was particularly alarming because it was by 13 points at home. The Sooners looked better at Texas on Saturday and had the lead late in the game, but couldn’t finish.

It’s still far too early to panic, but OU is starting to show some troubling signs that look frighteningly like what befell the Sooners over the second half of the season a year ago.

Through six games in the Big 12 schedule a year ago at this time the Sooners were 14-3 going into a game at Oklahoma State and round two of the annual hardwood version of the Bedlam series. OU lost in overtime at OSU and went on to lose 11 of its final 15 games, including a painful stretch of six in a row.

Oklahoma Sooners Basketball

What began as a hot 12-1 start a year ago ended in a 6-13 meltdown the rest of the way. Believe me, that memory is still very fresh in the minds of Sooner fans.  Too fresh, as it turns out.

For one thing, Oklahoma is not shooting as well as it did earlier in the season, and lately the stellar defense that has been a strength of this year’s team has been AWOL (away without leave). Part of the reason no doubt can be attributed to the stronger competition now that we are into the conference schedule. But the hardcore truth is that the Sooners are not playing as well as they did before the calendar changed.

Three of the Sooners four losses in Big 12 action have been on the road, and they have another difficult road contest coming up on Wednesday at Oklahoma State. I hesitate to remind you that is where there season took a serious left turn and began to spin out of control 12 months ago

Prospects were not real high for Oklahoma basketball coming into this season. After losing consensus All-American and top-10 NBA draft pick Trae Young along with two other players who elected to transfer off of last year’s team, the expectations for the 2018-19 version of Sooners basketball were even lower than where they finished the year earlier.

Most college basketball coaches, including the Big 12 coaches, projected Oklahoma to finish near the bottom of the conference standings. OU was picked to finish eighth out of the 10 conference teams in the Preseason Big 12 Coaches Poll.

After a four-week run in college basketball’s top 25, rising as high as No. 19 in the Coaches Poll, the Sooners (13-5, 2-4) dropped back out of the rankings this week because of their back-to-back losses. If you extended out the Associated Press voting, Oklahoma fell 11 spots, to No. 31 this week (No. 29 in the Coaches Poll).

They may be No. 31 in the AP poll, but, ironically, they currently sit in the eighth spot in the ultra-competitive Big 12, where just two games separates No. 1 and No. 9 in the conference standings.

Oklahoma hosts Vanderbilt this weekend in the Big 12/SEC Basketball Challenge. That will be followed by road trip to West Virginia the first weekend in February, sandwiched in between home games at Lloyd Noble Center against Baylor, Iowa State and Texas Tech.

With four of the next six games at home, the schedule sets up favorably for the Sooners, but they still have to go out and take care of business on the court. Oklahoma was 13-2 at home a year ago, but has already lost once there this season. The Sooners won just once away from home in the Big 12 last season. They are 0-3 on the road in the conference this season.

OU’s upcoming home games loom large, and the Sooners need to steal at least a couple of games on the road in their remaining six away games if they want to better last season’s record and prove the experts wrong.

The rest of the season begins Wednesday night…away from home… in Stillwater.