For the vast majority of teams, the college basketball season would have been over on March 14 regardless of current events. That was not the case for Lon Kruger’s Oklahoma basketball team.
The Sooners appeared to have rallied enough over their final four regular-season games to secure an NCAA Tournament appearance for the seventh time in nine seasons under head coach Lon Kruger.
No. 3-seeded Oklahoma probably had done enough that it didn’t matter what happened in its quarterfinal matchup with West Virginia in the Big 12 Tournament, which was a good thing because the lower-seeded Mountaineers were actually favored over the Sooners, who had swept West Virginia during the season.
All of that is speculation, of course, but it makes for a happy ending in what otherwise was a necessary but still frustrating end to an up-and-down season of Sooner basketball.
With the 2019-20 season at an end, the only remaining business is to reflect on the season just ended and look ahead to the next one. To that end, we address the former by recognizing outstanding individual performances and conferring postseason awards.