Oklahoma basketball: Meltdown at Texas Tech probably sealed Sooners’ fate

The second half of the Oklahoma basketball game at Texas Tech on Tuesday night was about as bad as it can get.

At least Sooner fans certainly hope so with three more regular-season games remaining. None of the three remaining games are against ranked Big 12 opponents, but that hasn’t seemed to matter in recent weeks.

If I didn’t know better, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that the Sooners took a team vote at halftime and decided not to show up for the second half.

Of course, they did show up, but it might have been better if they had just remained in the locker room at halftime.

In what clearly goes down as Oklahoma’s worst performance of the 2021-22 season, No. 9 Texas Tech chewed up the Sooners and spit them out in a 66-42 royal beatdown.

The Sooners may not be dead, as head coach Porter Moser keeps suggesting, but they are certainly playing like they are. Since recording its last win, which ironically was a 70-55 victory over these same Red Raiders on Feb. 11 — Oklahoma is 0-4 and has lost seven of its last eight games.

“The bottom line is we had to play really well to beat Texas Tech tonight,” said Moser in his postgame interview session. “We needed a lot of really good performances, and we didn’t have them.”

“Whether you lose by this much or by this much, it’s a loss. You’ve got to move forward, get their minds right.” — OU head coach Porter Moser after the loss to Texas Tech

Realistically speaking, OU probably wasn’t going to beat the Red Raiders on this night on their home hardwood.

Oklahoma was nearly a 10-point underdog entering the Tuesday night contest, after all, and Tech has been playing great basketball in recent weeks, winning as many games as the Sooners have lost over the same time frame. And you know the Red Raiders weren’t at all happy about losing by double digits at Oklahoma.

It’s not so much that the Sooners lost at Texas Tech but how they lost that is the most troubling.

The fact that no OU player scored in double digits in this game tells a lot of the story — Jalen Hill led all Sooners with eight points — but Oklahoma’s ability to secure the ball, which has been a problem the entire season, was abysmal in this contest. The Red Raiders scored 26 points off of 21 Sooner turnovers.

Texas Tech held a seven-point lead, 29-22, at halftime. No one would have imagined, however, that the Sooners would return to the floor after intermission and score a total of seven points over the first nearly 15 minutes of the second half. The Red Raiders opened the second half on a 10-0 run to stretch the seven-point advantage to 17. Three and a half minutes later, they reeled off 19 unanswered points to go up by 62-29.

At the 6:30 mark in the second half, Texas Tech had outscored Oklahoma 33-7 in the second half. Needless to say, the game was long over by that point. The Sooners finished out the game on a 13-4 run to bring the winning margin under 30 points, but it took a three-point shot by Akol Mawein with 0:02 remaining to get OU over 40 points, by far their lowest scoring output of the season.

Oklahoma returns home for a Bedlam rematch on Saturday with in-state rival Oklahoma State, who will probably be favored in the game given the Sooners drastic downturn.

Since starter Elijah Harkless went down with a season-ending injury, Oklahoma has lost its last two games by an average margin of 22.5 points. West Virginia follows OSU to Norman for a Tuesday night showdown between the two worst teams in the Big 12, then the Sooner head to Manhattan, Kansas, for the regular-season finale against a Kansas State team that has been playing really well, despite a 102-83 loss at Kansas on Tuesday.

Despite Oklahoma’s recent free fall — since the calendar turned to 2022, the Sooners are 4-12 — the next three games are all winnable. But Porter Moser’s short-handed group absolutely has to take care of business at home and actually play to win instead of trying not to lose.