It's been a sad tale of two diametrically different seasons for the Oklahoma men's basketball team in the fourth year with Porter Moser at the helm.
The Sooners stormed through the nonconference portion of the 2024-25 schedule, going 13-0, including impressive wins over several good Power Four teams in Michigan, Arizona and Louisville, but since conference play began at the first of the year, that same Oklahoma team has gone into hiding.
Moser's crew has gone 3-10 since being just one of two Division-I teams to start out the new calendar year undefeated, along with Florida.
OU is in the devastating throes of a five-game losing streak. What's worse, the road the Sooners are on features games against ranked SEC teams in four of the final five outings.
The one game on OU's remaining regular-season schedule that is not against a top-25 team is Texas, a team Moser has not beaten in seven tries as the Sooners' head coach, and that contest is at Austin in the regular-season finale.
It's hard to imagine that this Oklahoma team was actually ranked as high as No. 12 in the Associated Press Top 25 when the calendar hit January this season. By the second week in January, however, the Sooners had fallen completely out of the top 25 and haven't been on the radar of the AP voters since.
The NET rankings, which is a measurement tool the NCAA Tournament selection committee largely relies on in putting together the tournament field, currently has the Sooners No. 53. Only LSU (78) and South Carolina (94) among SEC teams are ranked lower.
Based on the current NET rankings, you could conclude that Oklahoma is still very much in the hunt as one of the top 68 teams, which is equal to the size of the NCAA Tournament field. The problem with the NET rankings is they do not fully account for all of the automatic berths that go to conference champions at all levels.
With the Sooners' prospects of making the tournament field slowly fading into the sunset, the odds realistically are also low that Moser will be retained at OU after this season. Because of this, the pressure is mounting on the Oklahoma administration to not wait until the end of the season to make the move.
Moser makes 3.3 million per year and his current contract runs through the 2027-28 season. If Oklahoma were to move on from him after this season, his buyout is reported to be around $7.5 million.
Porter Moser's buyout no longer matters. That loss is irredeemable.
— John E. Hoover 🌮 (@johnehoover) February 16, 2025
LSU hadn't won a game in a month, but came back from a 13-point lead, owned the last 2 minutes, made two 4-point plays, forced a miracle turnover on an inbounds pass and won.
Joe C. now has but one option.
The story has been pretty much the same every season Moser has been at Oklahoma. His teams start out strong -- which might say something about the teams the Sooners are scheduling in the nonconference portion of the season -- but when the competition level improves against Big 12 or now SEC teams, the Sooners' vulnerabilities are badly exposed.
Oklahoma does not have a winning conference record in any of Moser's four seasons in two different conferences as head of OU's men's basketball program. He is 22-43 against conference teams, which is an embarrassing record and a disturbing pattern, even at a football school like Oklahoma, and especially at a time when the vaunted Sooners' football program is also struggling.
As Stormin' in Norman editor Dekota Gregory pointed out in an article on Wednesday, Moser's .343 winning percentage against conference opponents is the worst in over 100 years of Oklahoma men's basketball.
The fact that Sooner Nation finds this highly unacceptable is self explanatory, but the real tipping point regarding Moser's future in Norman centers around the high probability of OU's absence from the NCAA Tournament for a fourth straight year under his leadership.
Despite Oklahoma's current basketball struggles, ESPN Bracketology expert Joe Lunardi still had the Sooners making the NCAA Tournament as of earlier this week. That changed on Friday, though, after OU was beat down by Florida.
The NCAA Tournament selection committee likes teams to be trending upward at this point in the season and not spiraling downward, as is the case with Oklahoma. It appears the Sooners are more likely to lose all five of their remaining games than come away with even a single win, let alone two, which is what would be required for OU to have even a bubble of a chance of sneaking into the NCAA Tournament field.
Regardless of the season outcome, Porter Moser already has one foot out the door.