Oklahoma basketball: February still a heartless month for Sooners

There is a lot of finger pointing going on right now inside and outside of the Oklahoma basketball program. No one seems to have an answer for the Sooners latest troubles.

It’s obviously more than one thing that has led to the Sooners’ precipitous fall off after starting out the season going 11-1. But that was before the calendar turned bringing the dawn of a new year and the beginning of Big 12 play.

It didn’t help that OU opened up the conference schedule with road games at Kansas and Texas Tech, both nationally ranked and two of the best teams this season in the Big 12, in two of its first three games. The Sooners actually played well in those two games, losing by seven points at both places. The seven-point winning margins, however, belied how close the score was late in both contests.

After going 1-2 in its first three league games, Oklahoma has won just twice more in its last nine games and is 0-5 against its last five Big 12 opponents.

There are two ways to look at this recent backslide: The Big 12 is one of the best leagues in college basketball, and the Sooners are not as good as at least seven of the nine other schools. Or Oklahoma is underachieving what it is capable of against Big 12 competition.

There isn’t much question that Lon Kruger’s troops are currently underachieving — they should not lose at home by 30 points to a Baylor team that has just one more overall win (16) than the Sooners this season — but it is also patently true that Oklahoma is not as good as most of teams in the Big 12.

There doesn’t appear to be a simple solution to stop the hemorrhaging that has hit Oklahoma basketball (the OU women had lost 10 in a row before ending the skid with a win over Kansas on Tuesday night), or a least not a remedy that the Sooners have been able to successfully execute.

There is, however, a pattern that has painfully emerged and doesn’t bode well for some kind of miracle turnaround at this late stage of the season. The month of February has bedeviled the Oklahoma men practically every season since Kruger took over the coaching reins in 2011.

The Sooners are 0-4 this season in February and are just 3-17 in their last 20 games in the second month of the year. OU is 15-25 in the month of February the past five seasons and 20-38 during the Kruger coaching era in Norman.

Oklahoma has three more February games this season — at TCU, home against Texas and at Iowa State, all teams that are ahead of the Sooners in the current standings — in an attempt to record its first win in the month since Feb. 25, 2017, an 81-51 home win over Kansas State. OU was just 5-13 in the Big 12 that season, the year after Buddy Hield and two other OU starters departed, and won just twice in eight February games.

Believe it or not, a little over a month ago, the Sooners were ranked 19th in the country and Joe Lunardi of “Bracketology” fame had them projected as a No. 3 seed in this season’s NCAA Tournament. Now, he still gives OU a chance, slim at best, to make the tournament field, but having to play its way in as one of the last four at-large bids.

ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas has a slightly more positive outlook for the Sooners. He ranks them No. 50 among the 68 teams he currently has making the NCAA Tournament, but that is based on OU making an immediate turnaround in its six remaining regular-season games.

February may have something to do with Oklahoma’s struggles on the hardwood, but when you consider that the Sooners went 6-1 during the month four years ago, albeit with a much more talented team, its pretty clear that the curse rests more with the players and coaches than what month it is.

Get better and the wins will come, regardless of the month.