Oklahoma basketball: Traditional football kingpins, like OU, have also reached heights in hoops

You may have noticed that the so-called blue bloods of the college football landscape — which count Oklahoma football among their exclusive number — are not the same as the flag-bearing programs that have long dominated college basketball.

The Oklahomas, Alabamas, Ohio States, Notre Dames and Michigans are historical landmarks in the college football world. But when it comes to legendary programs in college basketball, the names Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina and Duke are the ones that come first to mind.

It seems that you can only be historically good in one but not both and rarely ever at the same time.

Stewart Mandel, a staff writer for The Athletic, recently delved into this curious topic. “There’s not much overlap in the two sports (football and basketball) in terms of straight-up blue bloods,” Mandel points out in an article posted this week.

That being the premise of his article, Mandel raises the question: “How many football kings would at least be barons in men’s basketball?”

Mandel lists four giants of college football aristocracy in that category, and the four teams might surprise you. The four football Kings that are also worthy of baronship in the college basketball kingdom, according to Mandel, are Michigan, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Michigan State, with Texas as a potential fifth.

Here is the explanation Mandel provided in picking Oklahoma:

"“The Sooners have enough pockets of glory — Stacey King/Mookie Blaylock era, the Blake Griffin era, Buddy Hield/Trae Young era — to make the cut.”"

Interestingly, he left out perhaps the best and clearly most popular Sooner player of the modern era, not mentioning the Wayman Tisdale era.