Oklahoma basketball: It would have been nice to know OU’s NCAA seeding

With the unprecedented cancellation of March Madness because of the growing coronavirus danger, we will never know what the actual seeding of the men’s Oklahoma basketball team would have been, assuming that they would have made it into the 2020 NCAA Basketball Tournament.

Joe Lunardi, the ESPN bracketology wizard and his crystal ball counterpart at CBS Sports, Jerry Palm, have been periodically projecting what the NCAA Tournament bracket might look all season long, but those amounted to nothing more than best guesses that were good for debate on sports talk programs and editorial commentary by college basketball writers.

All indications were that Oklahoma had done enough during the make-or-break month of February to assure itself and at-large bid to this year’s tournament, regardless of what happened in the Big 12 postseason tournament.

In retrospect, that’s probably a good thing because the Sooners were set to face West Virginia in the quarterfinal round of the Big 12 Tournament. Oklahoma had already beaten the Mountaineers twice during the regular season, but it is widely believed that defeating the a team two or more times in the same season is one of the most difficult things to do in collegiate sports.

OU and West Virginia had identical 9-9 records in Big 12 games and were two of four teams (Texas Tech and Texas were the others) who tied for third place in the conference standings with the same record. The Big 12 tiebreaker rules awarded the No. 3 seed to the Sooners, with West Virginia falling to No. 6. This despite the fact that West Virginia was ranked 22nd in the final Associated Press poll for the season and Oklahoma was unranked.

Although Oklahoma’s season is now over — as it is for all of college basketball, given the evolving public health crisis — it doesn’t diminish the curiosity of what might have been.

After making the decision on Thursday to cancel this season’s NCAA Tournament, NCAA officials also said that, under the circumstances, they would not release a 68-team field, complete with seedings. In reality, a final bracket doesn’t even exist because the NCAA Tournament selection committee has not met to discuss or develop what the tournament field would look like.

If that would have happened, it would have been great, said OU head coach Lon Kruger in an interview with Joe Buettner of the Norman Transcript (I think the Sooner head man was more than a little curious himself). “If it does, it doesn’t diminish anything they’ve (the Sooners) accomplished.

"“There is some disappointment not being able to continue to participate,” Kruger added, “but it pales by comparison with the significance of the (coronavirus) event.”"

Even though we’ll never know for sure, it is still fun to speculate what might have been or what could still be.

To the latter point, the NCAA has said it will extend a year of eligibility to student-athletes in spring college sports who are being deprived of an entire season of participation and competing for championships. There is some thought that they might also consider this same rule for the winter sport of basketball. If that were to somehow come about, how great would it be to have another year with Kristian Doolittle, the Sooners’ lone senior on the basketball roster?

In what now becomes Joe Lunardi’s final bracketology projections for the 2019-20 college basketball campaign, he had Oklahoma (19-12) seeded No. 9 in the West Region and with an opening round matchup with No. 8 LSU (21-10) out of the SEC.

Jerry Palm also had the Sooners as a No. 9 seed. The CBS Sports college basketball expert had Oklahoma heading to the East Region, however, with the St. Mary’s Gaels (26-8) of the West Coast Conference as the first-game opponent.

Oklahoma was seeking to make its seventh NCAA Tournament appearance in the last eight seasons and 33rd all-time.

While it is fun to imagine what might have been, what is is that we are all immersed in a very serious health crisis, and it is most important right now that we all do everything we can to protect ourselves, our family members and friends from exposure to the rapidly growing public health threat presented by the coronavirus.