Oklahoma basketball: No NCAA bid coming, but can Sooners make NIT Tournament?
By Chip Rouse
Barring a major miracle, only one Oklahoma basketball team will be playing in the NCAA Basketball Tournament this year. And that will not be the Sooner men.
It’s been two highly disappointing seasons for football and men’s basketball at Oklahoma. Rarely in the modern era has there been a year in which both programs underachieved.
Unless something totally unpredictable happens this week — the final week in the Big 12 regular season — the football and men’s basketball programs will share a dubious distinction: Both will have completed the season winning fewer than 33 percent of their conference games. The Sooners were 3-6 (.333) in football and unless OU wins one of its final two games, it will end up with a 4-14 conference record, a horrific win percentage of .286.
Looking at it from a glass half full perspective, though, it is still possible the Sooners could surprise the basketball world and win both of its final two regular-season games, which would allow OU to improve to a 6-12 record in the conference, but still no better than their football brethren percentage-wise.
The bottom line is, even with wins in its final two games of the regular season and a first-round win in next week’s Big 12 Tournament, Oklahoma does not have enough quad one wins on its resume to earn an NCAA Tournament bid. That out of the way, the follow-on question is: Would the Sooners receive a bid for a second-straight trip to the NIT, which some sarcastically refer to as the “not invited tournament”?
The short answer is probably not. And would that really be so bad? Were Oklahoma to get the call to play in the 2023 NIT, it would not be as a high seed, which would mean they probably wouldn’t get a home game and would just prolong the inevitable: an early exit and further heartbreak.
The Sooners missed out on the NCAA Tournament last season, but as a No. 1 seed in the NIT a year ago, OU had two home games. Oklahoma won the opening game handily before losing to unranked St. Bonaventure in the second round.
It’s time to face the fact that this may be a serviceable OU team that is capable of winning about half of its games — in any other league, that is, than the Big 12 — but it is not athletic enough or good enough to play in a postseason tournament that supposedly features the best teams and conference champions in Division I college basketball.
Best to cut the losses (pun intended) and move on to how to get better for next season.