Oklahoma basketball: 1980s was a decade like no other in Sooner history
By Chip Rouse
Just like the 1950s represented the greatest decade of Oklahoma football in terms of winning percentage, the decade of the1980s was the Oklahoma basketball equivalent.
The Sooners posted a record of 9-18 in 1980-81, their first season under head coach Billy Tubbs and only their second losing campaign in the previous 11.
It was a rough start for Tubbs, who the year before had guided Lamar University to 22 wins and a Sweet 16 appearance in the NCAA Tournament. The Sooners even lost at home to Lamar early in the 1980-81 season, which served as an additional slap in the face, both for the new Sooner head coach and their fans.
Looking back, that inaugural season for Tubbs at Oklahoma proved to be a huge anamoly, as the colorful head coach went on to win a record 333 games and never had another losing year in 14 seasons at Oklahoma. From 1980 to 1990, Tubbs’ Sooner teams won a total of 257 games, the most in any one decade in 12 decades of men’s Oklahoma basketball.
Oklahoma Sooners Basketball
The Sooners’ .756 winning percentage (257-83) over the 10 years in the 1980s is also the best in program history.
Oklahoma finished seventh in the Big Eight Conference in Tubbs’ first season. The Sooners moved up four spots, to third place, in his second year, second in his third and won back-to-back league championships in 1983-84 and 1984-85, in Wayman Tisdale’s sophomore and junior seasons.
After going 9-18 in Tubbs’ first season, the Sooners doubled their win total in 1981-82, going 22-11. The following year, Tubbs led Oklahoma to the first of eight consecutive NCAA sppearances in the 1980s. The Sooners were 15-8 in those eight trips to the NCAA Men’s Tournament. Prior to 1983, Oklahoma had only made four NCAA Tournament appearances in its history,
Tubbs has the most wins of the 13 head coaches in Oklahoma basketball history, and what his teams accomplished in the 1980s raised the bar and set a new standard of expectations for Sooner basketball.
Something that many Sooner fans may not be aware of is that Tubbs was not Oklahoma’s first choice for the head coach’s job in 1980 following Dave Bliss’ departure for SMU. The top candidate was John Thompson, who over the previous eight seasons had built Georgetown into a national power. Thonpson turned the Sooners down, and the rest is history.
What Tubbs started in the 1980s evolved into three consecutive decades with more than 200 wins. Oklahoma was 204-111 (.648) in the 1990s (four seasons under Tubbs and six under Kelvin Sampson) and 218-98 (.698) in the opening decade of the 2000s (six seasons under Sampson and four under Jeff Capel).
Oklahoma basketball dropped under 200 wins between 2010 and 2020 (193-135, .588), but still made six NCAA Tournament appearances and probably would have made it seven if March Madness would not have been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Over the past four decades, an Oklahoma basketball team has played in three Final Fours (1988, 2002 and 2016) and made it to the Elite Eight three times (1985, 2003 and 2009), and two Sooners have been named national player of the year (Blake Griffin in 2009 and Buddy Hield in 2016).
Basketball will also be second fiddle to football at Oklahoma, but beginning with the 1980s and continuing over the next three decades, the basketball program has set a high standard of its own.