The month of January was an unmitigated disaster for Oklahoma men's basketball and single-handedly changed both the altitude and attitude of the season.
The Sooners lost eight of nine conference games in January after beginning the month with a conference-opening home win over Ole Miss. The January woes carried over into February with OU suffering a ninth straight loss, by a 16-point margin at Kentucky, which left the Sooners one loss shy of tying a 62-year-old program record for consecutive losses.
Ten games into the highly competitive SEC schedule, the Sooner basketball season seemingly was at a place of no return and their chances to earn a spot in the NCAA Tournament were all but a pipedream.
Sooners finally figured it out but brutal losing streak still haunts their NCAA Tournament chances
Since that point of sitting at a miserable 1-9 in SEC play, OU has managed to find its footing, as well as some traction, and has strung together five wins in its last seven games, including a decisive 80-64 victory in a rematch with Missouri on Tuesday in the Sooners' home finale.
Following the win over Missouri, ESPN's Joe Lunardi even had Oklahoma back on his NCAA Tournament radar as a potential, albeit an extreme long shot, bubble team. You've got to admit, though, that represents a huge turnaround over where the program sat just a short month ago.
Riding a three-game winning streak, Oklahoma heads across the Red River this weekend to face chief rival Texas on Saturday for the final game of the regular season and another chance to settle the score from an earlier season loss. If the Sooners can play spoiler one more time and pull off the upset in Austin, they will finish out the regular season winning their final four games and with a 17-14 overall record and a 7-11 mark in the conference.
Here's where I introduce the what-if question and apply it to the current reality, if for no other reason than for the sake of fantasy and what could have been.
Four of Oklahoma's 11 losses this season were by four or fewer points (83-81 to Alabama, 88-87 in OT to Missouri, 83-79 to Arkansas and 75-71 to Texas A&M). All but Texas A&M were during the OU's nine-game losing streak. Oklahoma held second-half leads in all four of those games and were in a position in the final minutes to win all four games, but the Sooners were unable to make shots at critical times and couldn't close them out with a victory.
One or two of those losses, especially the double buzzer-beater contest at Missouri and the home loss to Alabama, definitely should have been in the Oklahoma win column. But say the Sooners were able to also get over the hump in the close encounters with both Arkansas and Texas A&M. Simple math tells us that would have meant four more OU wins and, conversely, four less on the loss side.
Now comes the feel-good moment for Sooner fans. Had the aforementioned scenario come to pass and altered the current reality, Oklahoma would be sitting at 20-10 overall and 10-7 in SEC play, and probably considered a lock to make the 64-team NCAA Tournament field, regardless of what happens this weekend against Texas.
Just as Oklahoma would have gained from addition through subtraction, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas A&M would have been impacted in the reverse insofar as the conference standings were concerned.
Again, hypothetically, with a 10-7 conference record, a forthcoming loss at Texas would have resulted in the Sooners earning no worse than a No. 9 seed in next week's SEC Men's Basketball Tournament as they are currently projected as a 12- or 13-seed. A win over Texas in the regular-season finale, however, would have guaranteed Oklahoma no worse than a No. 5 seed and a first-day bye in the SEC Tournament.
This is all pie-in-the-sky stuff, of course, given the way the 2025-26 season has turned out in actuality for Oklahoma basketball, but it underscores how important it is to be able to finish out close games.
The Sooners have demonstrated in their four most recent wins -- all by an average of 15.0 points --that they had the talent to win in the SEC this season, and once they got back into the mindset of playing to win instead of trying not to lose, the wins started to come again.
Good that we got to see it again, but too bad it came too little and too late to prevent yet another disappointing Oklahoma men's basketball season.