Oklahoma basketball: Rewinding what happened 32 years ago today

Oklahoma basketball has made 32 appearances in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. This year will not be one of them, but not by the Sooners’ doing.

With a 19-12 overall record and a third-place finish in the 2019-20 Big 12 regular season, Oklahoma was expected to make in back to the Big Dance for the 33rd season overall and the seventh time in nine seasons under head coach Lon Kruger.

The road to the Final Four took an unexpected detour this season, and on March 12 hit a dead end when the NCAA Tournament was cancelled because of the rapid worldwide spread of the coronavirus.

Unlike Kansas, where basketball is king, basketball is not the flagship athletic program at the University of Oklahoma. That honor belongs to football. The Sooners have been to five Final Fours in basketball in their history, while their football brethren have finished in the top four in the nation eight times in the last 20 years alone.

That’s why when Oklahoma is among the final four teams standing in NCAA Division I basketball, it is a huge deal.

Billy Tubbs, the winningest coach in OU men’s basketball history (331 wins) took nine different Sooner teams to the NCAA Tournament in his 14 seasons as head coach. Only four of those teams made it past the first weekend of the tournament.

The best of those four advancing Oklahoma teams was the 1987-88 group that not only made it out of the first weekend, but all the way to the Final Four and into the national championship game, one of only two times a Sooner team has made it that far.

It was on this date (April 4) in 1988 that No. 1 seed Oklahoma, champions of the Southeast Regional and the sixth-seeded Kansas Jayhawks, winners of the Midwest Regional and a team that the Sooners had already beaten twice that season, found each other face to face in an All-Big Eight showdown for the national championship.

Oklahoma, which featured three players in its starting lineup that would go on to be first-round NBA draft selections (Stacey King, Mookie Blaylock and Harvey Grant), entered the national championship with a record of 35-3 and victories during the season over five ranked teams, including an 86-78 win over No. 2-ranked Arizona in the national semifinals.

Kansas came into the national title game with a 27-11 record and a third-place finish in the Big Eight. The Jayhawks began the season ranked seventh in the nation, but had dropped out of the rankings by midseason.

Oklahoma averaged 103 points that season and was a heavy favorite to defeat Kansas for a third time and win its first national championship. Having to play against what later became known as “Danny Manning and the Miracles” at Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, practically in Kansas’ back yard, proved to be a bigger challenge than first thought.

Kansas coach Larry Brown did the unimaginable in installing a game plan to run with the Sooners, an approach that most every other team that was courageous enough to try  during the course of the season did so with ghastly results.

The first 20 minutes was played at a blistering “Billy Ball” pace, and the Sooners were unsuccessful in trying to run the undermanned and out-of-character Jayhawks out of the arena. No one would have ever predicted that Kansas would play Oklahoma’s style of game, shoot 71 percent and that the two teams would end the first half all deadlocked at half a hundred apiece.

At halftime, Brown praised the Jayhawks for playing Oklahoma’s game in the first half and doing so to great success. For the next 20 minutes, he instructed his team, let’s make them play our game.

The pace slowed considerably in the second half. Perhaps even more surprising, the Sooners appeared to be the more tired team.

While Oklahoma appeared that it might be starting to pull away, building a 65-60 advantage with around 12 minutes to go in the game, Kansas quickly responded behind Manning and his supporting cast of miracle makers. The Jayhawks outscored the Sooners 23-14 over the final dozen minutes, leaving the entire Sooner Nation stunned and in utter disbelief.

Although the Jayhawk shooting tailed off some in the second half, Kansas still finished the game shooting 64 percent. Manning led all scorers in the game with 31 points and 18 rebounds  All of the Sooners’ scoring came from the five starters, led by Dave Sieger with 22 points, including seven three-pointers.

Oklahoma’s pressing defense forced 23 Kansas turnovers, including seven steals by the country’s No. 1 ball thief, Mookie Blaylock. Unlike in most of the Sooners’ 35 wins on the season, however, they weren’t able to turn that to their advantage.

This was a game that fans of Oklahoma basketball will never get over. It was a game in which nearly everything was aligned in OU’s favor and had it been a best of seven series the Sooners would probably have won in five or six games.

But this was a one-game, winner-take-all elimination, and on this particular day, 32 years ago, Kansas was the better team, and all Sooner fans can do is forever wonder what might have been.