Oklahoma fans can't escape the misery after men's basketball's season-opening flop

One game does not make a season, but Oklahoma's stunning 68-64 season-opening loss to East Texas A&M, a team that has competed at the Division I level for just five seasons, is one that is going to haunt the Sooners the entire season.

This was much more than a single slash mark in the loss column for Oklahoma head coach Porter Moser and the Sooners in the marathon that is the college basketball season. It is a devastating loss of historic proportions.

Coming into Monday's game, East Texas A&M was ranked 298th out of 365 Division I teams. By comparison, Oklahoma was 29th. It's going to take quite a while for the Sooners to dig out of the hole a loss like this poses to their season body of work. If it were to come down to an NCAA Tournament bubble discussion at the end of the season, for example, this loss would be about as bad as you could have in any tiebreaker scenario.

Oklahoma was a 28.5-point favorite coming into this game against the Lions of East Texas A&M, a team that ended last season with an 11-23 overall record and tied for last place in the low-major Southland Conference. Moreover, the Lions are projected to finish at the back of the pack in the conference once again this season

The Sooners jumped out to a quick 5-0 lead less than two minutes into the game and held a 12-10 advantage after the first five minutes, but for the final 35 minutes, it was all East Texas A&M in what was the second-largest Division I upset by point spread in the last 30 years. Moreover, the loss also snapped a 30-game home win streak by the Sooners against non-conference opponents.

Sooners' embarrassing loss is maybe the worst in OU history

With the struggles of Oklahoma football this season and now the horrific start to the season by OU men's basketball, it's as if Sooner men's sports are under some kind of black magic spell.

Unfortunately, in both sports, the Sooners appear to have fallen victim to their own undoing and the inability to make plays, especially on the offensive end. In Monday's hoops season opener, for example, Oklahoma shot just 29.6% in the first half, 18.2% (2-of-11) from three-point range, and made only one out of 12 field-goal attempts in the final 6:53 of the half to fall behind 34-25 at the intermission.

The East Texas A&M lead actually grew to 16 in the opening minutes of the second half to go up 43-27 with 17:23 to go in the game. The Sooners mounted a furious comeback from that point, finally finding their shooting touch and outscoring the Lions 31-15 over the next 11-plus minutes to draw even at 58-58 with 4:55 remaining. But that was as close as OU would get.

The Sooners ultimately sealed their own fate, shooting just 53.1% from the free-throw line. Oklahoma had 32 free-throw attempts to just 13 for East Texas A&M, but the Sooners misfired on 15 of them. Just half that many would have made the difference in the game. Another huge disparity was in three-point shooting. The Lions registered an 18-point difference in made three-pointers (11 to 5).

There's no way to sugarcoat this. It will go down not only as the worst loss this century in OU men's basketball, but one of the worst defeats in the 118-year history of the program.

Moser has been on the hot seat for the past few seasons, having taken Oklahoma to the NCAA Tournament just once in five seasons as the Sooners' head coach. All the while, he has lamented the inability to fill the seats at Lloyd Noble Center for men's games. What happened on Monday night won't help that cause.

The OU head coach barely got settled into his seat at Monday's postgame press conference before offering, "Before we can take any questions, the only thing I know what to do is apologize to the fan base and get better. But I apologize to every single person who came in."

"The things you do in a game like this in basketball that gets you beat, we did," he said..."We played on our heels the whole night. We tried to make a comeback, but being on our heels and playing not to lose... not good enough."

The Sooners were without leading scorer, senior guard Xzayvier Brown, who was ruled out of the game just a few hours before tip-off with a lower-body injury. When asked if he thought the Oklahoma offense would perform as poorly as it did without Brown in the lineup, Moser responded simply, "You'd hope not."

In the weeks and months leading up to the new season, everything we have read and heard about the prospects for Oklahoma men's basketball in 2026-27 is that this could be the best roster assembled under Moser in his five seasons as head coach. That's clearly not what we witnessed in Monday's season opener.

Unlike the rosters of the last five seasons under Moser, the 2026-27 Oklahoma roster features a nice balance of returning players, transfers, and true freshmen. While this group may look very impressive on paper, the chemistry of playing together and for each other on the court appears to have a way to go to deliver what was expected from this group.

Interestingly, though, the two Sooners who had the most difficult opening game on Monday were returning players Derrion Reid and Dayton Forsythe. Reid was 4-of-10 from the field and just 5-for-10 at the charity stripe. Forsythe, meanwhile, was 3-of-10 from the floor but just 1-for-7 from behind the three-point arc.

Moser promised that things will look different going forward.

"There's no running away from this loss," the Sooner head coach acknowledged. "How we respond and move forward from this is what will define us."

And the first step forward will be Friday night at McCasland Field House in a game against Mississippi Valley State, a team that has won a grand total of 16 games over the past five seasons and ranks 365th out of 365 in the current KenPom rankings.

The opening week of the new college basketball season was supposed to be a slam dunk for the Oklahoma men and get the new-look Sooners off on the right foot with a quick 2-0 start. So far, that has proved to be anything but.

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