Oklahoma freshman Aaliyah Chavez stole the ball and scored on an LSU inbound play to bring OU within two points, 32-30, midway through the second quarter. That was as close as the Sooners got in their quarterfinal matchup with LSU in the SEC Women's Basketball Tournament on Friday as the No. 4-seeded Tigers slowly and surgically turned OU mistakes and missed shots into a 112-78 bloodbath.
LSU outscored the No. 5 Sooners 80-48 over the final 25 minutes of Friday's quarterfinal game and 67-45 in the second half. It's bad enough to suffer an embarrassing loss like this at any point in a season, but the timing of LSU's utter annihilation of an Oklahoma team that entered the game with just six losses in 30 games and ranked No. 7 in the country couldn't have come at a worse time.
Sooners losing grips on hosting rights after SEC Tournament lost
A loss like this is certain to take an emotional toll and have an impact on a team's overall confidence level, and the fact that for the Sooners it came during conference championship week, just ahead of NCAA Tournament selection and seeding, is incredibly bad timing and costly on a couple of fronts for Oklahoma.
Last week, during the course of a seven-game Oklahoma winning streak, Charlie Creme, ESPN's bracketology counterpart of Joe Lunardi on the women's side, had the Sooners on the 3-line in his NCAA Tournament projections. The importance of that seeding is that a top-4 seed earns a team the opportunity to host the opening weekend of games.
Oklahoma's chances of hosting the first and second rounds of the NCAA Tournament may be slipping away
Perhaps the most costly outcome of OU's loss to LSU -- not just the loss by itself but the way it came about -- is that the Sooners could lose out on the opportunity to serve as a host team for the first- and second-round games, as well as the advantage of playing at home at Lloyd Noble Center for as many as two tournament games.
After the SEC Tournament loss to LSU, Creme dropped OU to a projected 4-seed, but that, of course, does not guarantee that the NCAA Tournament selection committee will view the Sooners the same way, especially given what they looked like against LSU.
So how did everything unravel for Oklahoma in what will go down as one of its worst, if not the worst, performances of the season? The 34-point loss definitely was the worst of the season by score margin, plus the second-most points ever allowed by a Sooner women's team since 124 by Utah in 2022.
Oklahoma may not have been destined to win this game under the best of conditions -- the Sooners lost by 18 points at home to LSU earlier in the season - but it certainly did nothing to help its cause in the SEC Tournament showdown.
Only two Sooners were able to get much done offensively as freshman Aaliyah Chavez scored 20 points and Sahara Williams had 19. No one else reached double figures as OU shot just 26% in the opening half and ended up at 36.1% for the game.
The lethal blow, however, was the 21 Sooner turnovers that LSU converted into 35 points, which proved to be the big difference in the game.
A total of 53 fouls were whistled in the contest, making it difficult on both sides to get their offense in any kind of consistent rhythm, but that obviously had a greater impact on the Sooners. Two OU players (Raegan Beers and Brooklyn Stewart) fouled out and two others (Chavez and Williams) collected four fouls each.
Despite the ugly result in OU's second SEC Tournament, Oklahoma can claim 13 wins this season over opponents ranked in the top 100 of the NET rankings and six Quad 1 victories. As of Saturday morning, the Sooners were 13th in the NET rankings and LSU was No. 5.
Selection Sunday is March 15, but the top-16 teams (host sites) will be revealed by the selection committee on March 14.