While Sooner football dominates the OU sports calendar during this time of the year, men’s Oklahoma basketball waits patiently in the wings.
But not for long. The 2023-24 college basketball season officially tips off for the Sooners on Monday, Nov. 6 with Oklahoma hosting Central Michigan at Lloyd Noble Center. That’s just 15 days from now.
Formal preparations for the 2023-24 season are well underway for both the OU men and women, and once again this season you’re going to need a program to identify all the new faces on head coach Porter Moser’s men’s roster.
The 2023-24 season will be Oklahoma’s final season as a member of the Big 12 Conference. The Sooners will be part of the SEC beginning next season.
Six players from last year’s OU roster entered the transfer portal after the 2022-23 season, including three starters. That was similar to the roster fallout from the 2021-22 season, Moser’s first at Oklahoma.
“I know with the transfer portal and everything every year, there’s a lot of turnover, a lot of new guys,” Moser said this week at Big 12 Basketball Tipoff Media Day in Kansas City.
“We can talk about the negatives of the transfer portal, but the positives are you can add key additions. We feel like we have.”
For the coming season, Moser has added six transfers to replace what was lost along with a pair of freshmen who ranked in the top 100 of the 2023 class nationally. The transfers come from all across the country, including talent from the ACC, Pac-12, the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) and the Western Athletic Conference (WAC).
Moser says the first couple of things you will notice as we begin to open a new season and is that “we’re definitely longer and more athletic, which enables us to play faster.”
Backcourt starters Milos Uzan and Otega Oweh return for their sophomore seasons. They will be joined by combination guard Javian McCollum from Siena and Le’Tre Darthard, who played the last three seasons at Utah Valley in the WAC. McCollum, a 6-foot-2 junior, averaged 15.9 points a game last season; Darthard, a graduate transfer, averaged 13.8. Both were first-team all-conference players last season.
The Sooners have also brought in 6-foot-6 guard Rivaldo Soares, a grad transfer from Oregon. Soares started 33 of Oregon’s 36 games last season and averaged 7.2 points, 3.6 rebounds and 1.8 assists.
Former transfer Sam Godwin returns for his senior season. A leading reserve coming off the bench last season Godwin averaged 4.9 points and 3.3 rebounds and scored 10 or more points in five games. He’ll be looked to for a bigger and more consistent contribution in the 2023-24 campaign.
Perhaps the biggest addition to the Sooner roster this season, and not just in a literal sense is 6-foot-10 forward John Hugely IV, who comes to OU after three seasons at Pittsburgh. The redshirt-junior has averaged double-digits in scoring for his career but missed the second half of last season with an injury. His best season was his sophomore year when he averaged 14.8 points and nearly eight rebounds in 31 starts for Pitt.”
He’s a load inside,” Moser said about Hugely. He’s a hard guy to switch on because of his passing skill out of the post position and his ability to seal off down low.
Six-foot, 7-inch forward Jalon Moore from Georgia Tech gives the Sooners a blue-collar type player who can come off the bench, give you some versatility and provide valuable minutes.
OU’s two freshmen additions are four-star recruit Kaden Cooper from Ada, Oklahoma, rated as the No. 15 small forward in the 2023 class, and three-star Jacolb Cole, rated the No. 37 small forward in the class by 247Sports, out of Branson, Mo.
Oklahoma had some difficulty scoring last season (averaging just 68 points a game, tied for 273rd in the country), including extended scoring droughts, some at critical stages of games. That and inconsistent defensive play were big reasons finished with an overall 15-17 record last season and just 5-13 and tied for last place in the Big 12.
This will be a trying and important year for Moser, who won just five Big 12 games last season and just seven the year before. The Sooners have missed the NCAA Tournament in both of Moser’s two seasons in Norman and haven’t made the tournament since Lon Kruger’s final season in 2020-21.