Oklahoma basketball should feel good about way it closed out the season
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma basketball season and the college careers of three Sooner seniors who were on OU’s 2016 Final Four team came to a sudden and sad end on Sunday with a loss to No. 1 seed Virginia in the second round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
Every basketball season must come to an end sometime, and for all but one it will end in a loss. The goal of every NCAA Division I team at the beginning of every season is to make it into the postseason and, in particular, the NCAA Basketball Championship.
Only 68 teams are deemed worthy enough to receive automatic or at-large bids to the NCAA Tournament every season, and after the wall-to-wall first weekend, only 16 are left standing.
The Sooners not only made it into the NCAA Tournament this season, but got to stay over into the weekend and play a second game following an impressive 23-point win over lower-seeded Ole Miss. Oklahoma lost on Sunday to a very good Virginia team that at one point this season was ranked No. 1 in the land and could easily go on to become the last team standing when all is said and done two weeks from now.
Despite the loss on Sunday, the Sooners and their fans should feel upbeat about how things played out once the calendar turned to March and after a near disastrous month of February.
After being projected to finish eighth in the Big 12 in the Big 12 Preseason Coaches Poll and a longshot at best to make the NCAA Tournament, Oklahoma surprised many people by racing out to a 12-2 record through the first week in January. At one point, the Sooners were at No. 19 in the Coaches Poll and 20th in the Associated Press Top 25.
But then reality began to set in. Once the Big 12 season began in early January, the Sooners finished the month at 3-4, and things were about to get much worse in February. Oklahoma won just twice in seven games in February, and that included a consecutive losing skid that lasted five games between Jan. 28 and Feb. 11.
On Feb. 11, the Sooners’ Big 12 record stood at 3-9. Only West Virginia and Oklahoma State had worse conference marks. Despite this dismal league record, ESPN’s “Bracketology” wizard Joe Lunardi at the time still had Oklahoma in the 68-team NCAA Tournament field, albeit as a bubble team and one of the “last four in.”
Oklahoma Sooners Basketball
That may have been the low point of the season for men’s Oklahoma basketball. In spite of that, or quite possibly because of it, the Sooners finished out the regular season winning four of its final six games, including a pivotal 81-68 home win over 14-time defending Big 12 champion Kansas.
The rest, of course, is now history, but there is no way the Sooner players themselves or their fans should look back on the season just ended as anything but a successful one, despite a seventh-place finish in the Big 12.
For one thing, Oklahoma won 20 games for the first time in three seasons (since the 2015-16 Sooner team that won 24 and advanced to the Final Four).
They also made an NCAA appearance for the seventh consecutive season, all under head coach Lon Kruger, something some 280 other NCAA Division I teams, including four other Big 12 schools (Texas, TCU, West Virginia and Oklahoma State) didn’t have the privilege of doing this season. And the Sooners didn’t just make an appearance, they won a tournament game and moved on to the round of 32.
“I think you mix (the players returning) in with the recruiting class, the future looks pretty good.” — OU assistant basketball coach Chris Crutchfield
Seniors Christian James, Jamuni McNeace and Rashard Odomes, and graduate transfers Aaron Calixte and Miles Reynolds have played their final game in an Oklahoma uniform, but the Sooners have a strong nucleus returning next season along with a top-20 recruiting class. So the future for OU basketball looks even brighter, and gives Sooner fans something to savor and look forward to over the long offseason.
Returning next season are two of Oklahoma’s top three scorers — Brady Manek and Kristian Doolittle, the Big 12’s Most Improved Player this season — along with freshman starting point guard Jamal Bieniemy. The Sooners will also have the services of Wichita State transfer guard Austin Reaves and 6-foot, 10-inch junior-college transfer Kur Kuath. Reaves had to sit out a year because of the NCAA transfer rule and Kuath was redshirted this season.
Other than the year they brought in top-five national prospect Trae Young, the 2019 Sooner recruiting class on paper appears to be one of OU’s best in years. The class, ranked 15th best by Rivals.com and No. 2in the Big 12 (one spot behind Texas Tech), is led by four-star guard De’Vion Harmon, out of Denton, Texas, rated as the No. 5 point guard nationally in the 2019 class. Harmon is expected to contribute immediately.
The Sooners also are bringing in four-star forwards Jalen Hill and Victor Iwuakor, and junior-college transfers Alondes Williams and Corbin Merritt should help replace some of the experience lost by the departing seniors.
“I think you mix (the players returning) in with the recruiting class, the future looks pretty good,” OU assistant coach Chris Crutchfield told Joe Mussato of the Oklahoma City Oklahoman.
Expect the relevance bar to be much higher for Oklahoma basketball next season, and for good reason.