Oklahoma basketball: ESPN’s Joe Lunardi projects OU as NCAA Tournament No. 9 seed
By Chip Rouse
With more than half of the 2023-24 men’s Oklahoma basketball roster made up of newcomers, the Sooners weren’t on the radar of many, if any, college basketball experts as a contending team in the high-powered Big 12 Conference.
Head coach Porter Moser’s Sooners have not made the NCAA Tournament in either of his two seasons in Norman, and given the roster turnover, preseason projections weren’t promising that OU would make it into postseason play come March 2024.
Three weeks into the 2023-24 season, however, the OU men have been one of the most surprising teams in the Big 12. The Sooners are off to a 6-0 start, including one top-25 win. The last time an Oklahoma team started the season with as many as six straight wins was the Buddy Hield-led Sooner team that started out 12-0 on the way to a 29-7 record and an NCAA Final Four appearance.
This week Oklahoma is back in the top-25 rankings for the first time since the 2020-21 season, Lon Kruger’s final season as head coach. The Sooners are No. 25 in the Associated Press weekly poll. Moreover, ESPN college basketball Bracketology poobah Joe Lunardi has the Sooners projected as a No. 9 seed in the 2024 NCAA Men’s Tournament.
That may not seem like a big deal to some, but considering that Oklahoma was nowhere to be found in Lunardi’s preseason NCAA Tournament projections and was picked to finish near the bottom of the Big 12 this season, this is a very big deal. And if the Sooners can sustain it for the next three months, it will constitute a huge development.
The last time Oklahoma missed the NCAA Tournament for three consecutive seasons was from 2009 to 2012 in the final two years of head coach Jeff Capel and the first season under Lon Kruger.
Moser has had to deal with a roster overhaul in each of his three seasons and has had to heavily rely on the transfer portal to replenish the losses created by transfers and graduation. The Sooners were 19-16 overall and 7-11 in the Big 12 in Moser’s debut year in 2021-22. Last season, the Sooners finished below .500 at 15-17 with a 5-13 record in the conference.
Expectations may have been even lower heading into this season. The annual Big 12 preseason poll by the league coaches has Oklahoma finishing 12th out of 14 teams in the conference standings.
The season is only several weeks old, so there is still 80 percent of the season still to be played. Much can happen over that time, but it is terrific to see how this new group of Sooner players is gelling so well this early in the season. We’ll learn a lot more about this time during December. Oklahoma plays Providence, Arkansas and North Carolina in three of its next five games.