Oklahoma basketball: Remembering what happened on this date
By Chip Rouse
The Oklahoma basketball Sooners have won 30 or more games four times in program history, but just once since 2000.
In the 2001-02 season, the Sooner men won 31 games and lost just five times, the second winningest season in school history. That OU group finished 13-3 in the sixth season of the Big 12 Conference, finishing second behind regular-season champion Kansas in the league standings.
The Sooners lost to then-No. 5 Kansas in the regular season, but avenged that defeat with a 64-55 victory over the then-No. 1-ranked Jayhawks in the championship game of the Big 12 postseason tournament.
By winning the 2002 Big 12 Tournament, Oklahoma was awarded the conference’s automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament. It was the sixth consecutive appearance for the Sooners under head coach Kelvin Sampson. Oklahoma had been a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament in 2000 and No. 4 in 2001, but they entered March Madness in 2002 as a No. 2 seed.
Unlike the previous two seasons, when the Sooners failed to make it to the second weekend, OU disposed of Illinois-Chicago and Xavier in its first two tournament games, then defeated Arizona by 21 points in the round of 16 and fellow Big 12 member Missouri , for a second time that season, in the Elite Eight to advance to the NCAA Final Four for the fourth time in school history.
Two Big 12 teams actually made it to the Final Four in the 2002 season, much like was the case 14 years earlier, when two teams out of the Big Eight, Kansas and Oklahoma, had made it to the final weekend.
The way the Final Four bracket was set up in 2002, with the Sooners and Jayhawks on opposite sides of the bracket, it set up the intriguing possibility of those two teams meeting in a rematch of the 1988 All-Big Eight national championship. Of course, both teams would have to win their national semifinal game for that to become a reality.
No. 2 Oklahoma, the champions of the West Regional, faced No. 5 Indiana, the champions of the South Regional, in the first of two national semifinal games at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta on March 30, 2002. Midwest Regional champ Kansas and Maryland, champions of the East Regional, a pair of No. 1 seeds, squared off in the second national semifinal.
Oklahoma held its own in the first half against Indiana, taking a 34-30 lead to the locker room at halftime. The underdog Hoosiers took advantage of poor shooting by the Sooners in the second half and gradually took control of the game.
Indiana led by seven points, 60-53, with a little over five minutes to go in the game, but the Sooners rallied to drawn even at 60-all. That was as close as Oklahoma would get, however, as the magic ended with a 13-4 Indiana run over the next three minutes that put the game away and advanced the Hoosiers to the national championship game with a 73-64 victory over the Sooners.
Forwards Aaron McGhee and Ebi Ere led Oklahoma with 22 and 15 points, respectively. The Sooners shot just 36.4 percent for the game and were 2 for 18 from three-point range, an area that had been a strength of the team during the regular season. Indiana, meanwhile, shot 52.1 percent for the game, while taking 18 fewer shots than the Sooners.
Hollis Price, who led Oklahoma with a 16.5 season scoring average, scored just six points in the national semifinal game with Indiana.
While any hopes of an All-Big 12 national championship final went out the window with the Oklahoma loss, Kansas fared no better in the second half of the national semifinal, falling to eventual national champion Maryland 64-52.
To paraphrase the memorable closing line of the late CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, “…and that’s the way it was, March 30, 2002.”