Oklahoma basketball: ‘Bracketology’ now has Sooners as No. 4 seed
By Chip Rouse
When was the last time an Oklahoma basketball team was ranked higher than perennial Big 12 champion Kansas in the national rankings?
The answer to that question may not be as long ago as you might think. The week of Feb. 8, 2016, Oklahoma, with Buddy Hield, the national player of the year that season, was ranked No. 3 in the Associated Press Top 25. Kansas was No. 6. The Oklahoma ranking was actually down from the previous two weeks, when OU was the top-ranked team in the AP poll.
The 2008-09 Sooner team that featured another national player of the year, Blake Griffin, was 30-6 but finished second to Kansas, one game back in the Big 12 standings. Despite that, Oklahoma finished third in the final Associated Press poll that season and earned a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Kansas ended up sixth in the AP poll in 2008-09 and was a No. 3 seed in the 2009 NCAA Tournament. That was the last time an Oklahoma team ended the season ranked higher than the Jayhawks and the last time the Sooners were seeded higher going into March Madness.
You’re probably wondering, why is all of this relevant? Unless you’re a Sooner basketball fan returning from a trip to another galaxy, you are aware that Oklahoma, the team the Big 12 coaches picked to finish sixth in the Big 12 this season in the annual Preseason Big 12 Poll, completed January with wins over teams ranked in the top 10 in the country, including three of those consecutively between Jan. 23 and Jan. 30.
Three of those top-10 wins were over teams that at the time were ranked No. 9, the exact spot Oklahoma owns in the latest AP poll. The Sooners were ranked No, 24 the week before. Their remarkable15-spot advancement in a single week was the most in program history.
Meanwhile, Kansas, which Oklahoma defeated a little over a week ago, handing the Jayhawks a highly uncharacteristic third consecutive loss, has dropped from a high of No. 3 in the country a little over a month ago all the way down to No. 23 this week in the AP poll.
The Sooners also are making a steady upward climb in ESPN “Bracketology” expert Joe Lunardi’s rolling forecast of the 2021 NCAA Tournament field.
The week of Jan. 2, for example, Lunardi didn’t have Oklahoma making the 68-team NCAA Tournament field. A week later, following OU’s first win of the season over a ranked opponent, Lunardi had moved the Sooners to the 11 line, but still having to play their way into the 64-team field.
Flash forward a couple more weeks, and on Jan. 22, Lunardi has Oklahoma up to the No. 9 line. As of last Friday, the Sooners were seeded sixth in Lunardi’s tournament projections, and on Monday this week, Oklahoma occupied one of the No. 4 seeds.
So to recap, in just a month’s time, Oklahoma has gone from not making this year’s NCAA Tournament, according to Lunardi’s Bracketology forecast, to one of the top 16 teams in the field.
As for Kansas — which is to Big 12 basketball like Oklahoma is to Big 12 football and has been a regular as an NCAA Tournament No. 1 or No. 2 seed throughout most of the Big 12 era — the Jayhawks have been slipping steadily backward the past couple of weeks and are now projected as a No. 5 seed, down three spots from where they were projected to begin the season.
This could all change, of course, over the remaining month of the season, but for this current snapshot in time, it’s nice to see Lon Kruger’s group playing at a high level and exceeding expectations, which is something Kruger has made a career of in his 35 years as a college head coach, the last 10 of which have been at Oklahoma.
There’s a reason Kruger is one of just two coaches who have taken five different teams to the NCAA Tournament. The Sooners have made six NCAA Tournament appearances under Kruger, and it would have been seven had the tournament not been cancelled for the first time in its 82-year history last season because of COVID-19.
Based on the current barometer, Oklahoma managed to overcome a stop-and-go start and now appears well on it way to another NCAA Tournament appearance this season