Oklahoma basketball: Wait till you see where one March Madness projection has Sooners
By Chip Rouse
It’s probably safe to say that the 8-0 start by the Oklahoma basketball men has caught many college hoops experts by surprise.
For the third straight year, which is the length of head coach Porter Moser’s time at Oklahoma, the Sooner roster is largely made up of additions from the ever-present transfer portal. What’s different about this season, however, is that the Sooner newcomers are playing exceptionally well together and having a major impact.
Talk about way-too-early projections, it seems like an exercise in futility to predict what the NCAA Tournament bracket will look like over 300 days from now. Yet there are already a handful of projections by national sources predicting who’s in and who’s out of the 2024 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
If you follow the college basketball preview magazines, you’re probably aware that virtually no one had the Sooners on the radar screen as, heaven forbid, a top-25 team, let alone a 2024 NCAA Tourney team. Here we are, though, almost a month into the 2023-24 season and Oklahoma is sitting at No. 19 in the most recent Associated Press poll and 22 in the Coaches Poll. That’s the highest the Sooners have been ranked in men’s basketball since February 2021.
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, the best known of the Bracketology gurus, did not have Oklahoma making the 2024 NCAA Tournament in his initial tournament projections this fall, but after starting off at 7-0 with wins over Iowa and No. 23 USC, he awarded the Sooners a projection of a precarious 8/9 seed. This week he has raised that to a No. 7 seed and one of 10 Big 12 teams to go Dancing in March.
This week, the initial NCAA NET (Net Evaluation Tool) rankings for the 2023-24 season came out with Oklahoma occupying the No. 14 position, one spot higher than reigning national champion Kansas, which is frankly quite suspect but is what it is.
Anyway, the folks at Stadium come out with their own early projection, based somewhat on the current NET rankings, of what the NCAA Tournament brackets will look like come March. And here’s the punch line: Oklahoma is sitting at a No. 4 seed.
Clearly there are many, many games left to be played and all of this is going to change multiple times over between now and NCAA Tournament Selection Sunday on March 17, 2024. But if you’re an Oklahoma fan, like yours truly, it’s nice to see this kind of recognition coming OU’s way, even if it is virtually meaningless at this point in time. A snapshot at best, but a promising one at that.