Oklahoma basketball: Sooners head to Baylor seeking answers

Oklahoma basketball crosses the Red River for a pair of road games this week in the Lone Star State. First stop will be Waco, Texas, and a Big Monday rematch with the Baylor Bears.

If you can’t get up for a rematch with a team that handed you an embarrassing 30-point loss at home in Norman two weeks ago, then things are far worse than they might appear. And things aren’t particularly good right now around the Sooner basketball program.

For the third consecutive week, Oklahoma (15-9. 3-8) has to endure a short Saturday-Monday turnaround, only this time the Monday game is on the road against a Baylor team that is playing very well right now. Before losing to Kansas State on Saturday, the Bears (15-8. 6-4) were tied for second place in the Big 12 standings.

The Sooners lead the all-time series with Baylor 45-16 and are 19-8 in games played in Waco. OU has been on the losing end the last two trips to Waco and is just 8-8 against the Bears in Lon Kruger’s seven-plus seasons as head coach of the Sooners.

OU and Baylor may have similar overall records this season, both with 15 total victories, but those records are highly deceiving. Directionally, the two teams are headed in very different directions. At a time of the season when good teams are starting to play at their very best, the Big 12 schedule has brought out the very worst in the Sooners over the past month. Meanwhile, Baylor had won six in a row before being upended in its last two outings.

The Sooners have lost four consecutive games and seven of their last 10 after going 11-1 to start the season and climbing to 19th in the national rankings (Coaches Poll).

A win on Monday night will give Baylor its fourth season sweep of Oklahoma. The Sooners, on the other hand, have swept the regular-season series from Baylor 16 times in the series history.

Baylor scouting report

Baylor sits in the middle of the Big 12 pack in most statistical categories, but the Bears are well coached, they are sound offensively and play solid defense. They lead the Big 12 in rebounding margin, outrebounding their opponents by a Big 12-best average of over six boards a game, an area in which Oklahoma has been struggling during its current four-game losing skid.

The Bears are led in the scoring column by senior Makai Mason, who ranks fourth in the Big 12, averaging 16.1 points a game. Mason shoots 40 percent from three-point range, and his is not the guy you want to put on the free-throw line. He averages 80 percent from the charity stripe.

Baylor lost one of its top scorers, Tristan Clark (14.3 points per game), to injury early in the conference season, but they have a balanced attack that features three players other than Mason who average at least nine points a game.

The Bears have three players (Mason, King McClure and Devonte Bandoo) who average right at or close to 40 percent in three-point shooting.

Baylor shot 54.4 percent and had seven different players score at least eight points in its 77-47 win last month in Norman, while holding the Sooners to a season-low 27.3 percent.

Sooner tip-ins

• Oklahoma is misfiring on all cylinders over its last 10 games. OU is not shooting the ball consistently, not rebounding like it did earlier in the season and not playing defense with the same energy and discipline it did to start the season. When you don’t do any of these things well, it’s extremely difficult to win in any league.
• Junior Kristian Doolittle is averaging 12.0 points and 7.7 rebounds in Big 12 games this season.
• Over the last three games, sophomore Brady Manek is averaging 15.0 points and shooting 62 percent from the field.
• Oklahoma is 14-2 this season when it scores at least 30 points in the first half.
• The Sooners are 15th in the country and first in the Big 12 in defensive rebounding. OU averages 29.3 defensive boards per game.
• OU senior Christian James is the only guard in the Big 12 averaging at least 15 points and 7.0 rebounds per game.

Bottom line

It’s hard to say what we will see from Oklahoma Monday night in Waco. The glass-half-full crowd will say that the Sooners are bound to snap out of this at some point and put a complete game together. Those fans who are less optimistic are probably resigned to the idea that we’ve seen this movie before (as in last season and the one before that) and the remainder of the season only gets worse.

I don’t see Baylor offering Oklahoma any kind of relief from its January-February free fall.

Baylor 76, Oklahoma 64

*Statistical information for this article was sourced, in part, from Big 12 Conference basketball statistics and the pregame notes published by the OU athletic department.