Oklahoma basketball: Sooners dangerously close to falling below NCAA Tourney cutline

If you’ve been following the travails of men’s Oklahoma basketball this season, I feel your pain.

The Sooners are working their way through a painful stretch of games and have to be wondering when things might once again go their way.

Here is the crux of OU’s problem: Since Jan. 11, when Oklahoma lost to Texas in Austin, the Sooners have played eight games against seven different opponents. They’ve come out on top in just one of those games, a 10-point win two weeks ago at West Virginia.

That’s the first part of the problem. Here’s the second part: The Sooners are looking dead ahead at five consecutive games against No. 9 Texas Tech (Wednesday night), at No. 8 Kansas on Saturday, No. 20 Texas next Tuesday at previously ranked Iowa State on Feb. 19 and then a second game with Texas Tech in Lubbock on Feb. 22.

That’s enough to strike concern in the minds of even the most confident and best of teams, let alone a team like the Sooners that is sinking fast and chasing an elusive win.

This underscores just how incredibly competitive the Big 12 is this year. Just a week ago, half of the 10-team Big 12 was ranked in the Associated Press Top 25. Four conference teams are ranked in the top 25 this week, and three of those teams are ranked in the top 10. It’s cliche to say this, but this season literally any team in the Big 12 is capable of beating any team on any given night.

Porter Moser may have picked the wrong season for his inaugural year as the Oklahoma head coach. It’s also the first season in a Sooner uniform for 10 members of the current roster.

If you take away a one-point and three-point loss in two of Oklahoma’s seven losses in the last eight outings, the Sooners’ averaging losing margin has been almost 13 points. And that’s concerning.

O.K., things are bound to turn around soon, right? After all, this is an Oklahoma team that began its Big 12 schedule with a 10-2 record that included wins against three opponents that were ranked in the top 15 at the time the game was played. One of those top-15 wins was a 22-point rout of an Arkansas team that just upset No. 1 Auburn (who the Sooners lost to this season).

While the road ahead appears daunting, to say the list, the eternal optimist in coach Moser chooses to address the situation from a different perspective.

"“Opportunity,” the OU head coach told reporters on Tuesday this week. “We got some of the best games on our schedule almost every night, and they’re an opportunity to get better.“None of them are easy,” Moser said. “We’ve got to play well to beat them, but our mindset is, ‘Opportunity, play better and chase getting better.'”"

After the Sooners beat then 11th-ranked Iowa State in early January, ESPN’s Joe Lunardi had Oklahoma projected as a No. 8 seed in this year’s NCAA Basketball Tournament. Over the past month, however, the Sooners have been slowly slipping downward in Lunardi’s rolling projection of the NCAA Tournament field.

As of this week, Lunardi has downgraded Oklahoma to an 11 seed and as one of the last four teams to receive a bye, which puts the Sooners dangerously close to falling outside of the 68-team tournament field.

The NCAA publishes daily NET rankings for every Division I basketball school. The acronym stands for NCAA Evaluation Tool and is the primary measurement tool used by the NCAA Tournament selection committee for selecting and seeding the tournament field.

The average NET ranking of teams in the Big 12 is 35.7. By comparison, the next closest conference is the Big Ten, whose 14 members have an average ranking of 59.1.

Oklahoma’s NET ranking is currently 48th. After the Sooners’ earlier win over Iowa State, their NET ranking was 31. Teams in the top 40 of the NET rankings at the close of the regular season generally are safe bets to make the tournament field. By that measure Moser’s team obviously has some work to do.

OU has eight games remaining in the regular season and the Big 12 Tournament. The Sooners are probably going to have to win at least four of the eight plus win a game in the conference tournament to make this year’s NCAA Tournament — like Moser taking a positive outlook — for the eighth time in the last nine years the tournament has been held.

Four more wins would give Oklahoma a 17-14 overall record and 7-11 in the Big 12. The Sooners had a 7-12 conference record in 2018-19 (regular season plus the league tournament) and still managed an at-large bid to the 2019 NCAA field as a No. 9 seed.

So the precedent is there, and with the Big 12 being even stronger this season than it was three years ago, as many as four more wins should be enough to get the Sooners into the NCAA Tournament.

Do the Sooners have it in them to seize the opportunity before them? We’ll know shortly, but time is running short.