No one would have bet on these Oklahoma Sooners to still be playing basketball. Yet, here they are, about to play on April 5 as only championships are on the line from here on out in college basketball.
The Sooners on Saturday cruised past Baylor 82-69 in Las Vegas to earn a spot in Sunday's championship of the College Basketball Crown against the winner of West Virginia and Creighton. The same team that lost nine in a row in January with a dead man walking leading them has now won 10 of their last 13 as head coach Porter Moser has his team trying to prove the selection committee wrong for leaving OU as the first team left out of the NCAA Tournament.
Porter Moser using NCAA Tournament snub as fuel for College Basketball Crown championship run
"This team has been through a lot," Moser said during his postgame interview with FOX. "This team will always be remembered in my heart. And they can take it away for the rest of their lives is that they were down. We had tough, adverse losses. We were set to the side of the road as dead. And they just kept on believing. They kept on prevailing. They kept on staying together. And then we flipped it."
The Sooners were at the bottom of the SEC after starting conference play 1-9 and destined for a losing record bad enough to lose Moser his job after five years. But after upsetting then-No. 15 Vanderbilt on the road in mid-February, the Sooners heated up as one of the hottest teams in college basketball to get just one win away from going dancing while also saving Moser's job for at least another year with the promise for more resources.
As a consolation to being snubbed from the NCAA Tournament, the Sooners accepted an invite to the College Basketball Crown that includes a prize pool for NIL money, which OU has secured at least $100,000 of with wins over former Big 12 foes Colorado and Baylor. A championship would make the Sooners $300,000 richer.
But the priceless reward is proving those wrong who deemed the Sooners unworthy of competing in the Big Dance.
"I said this, 'We can all be unhappy about what the committee did. We can all be unhappy and say this and that and the other. Or we can go out there and show them that they made a mistake,'" Moser said. "And that was our two choices. And these guys have come out, prepared and played hard. They just don't want it to end, because we're such a close group and such a close atmosphere here at Oklahoma with these guys, and we just didn't want to end and to keep playing."