No. 5 seeded Oklahoma on Friday was eliminated from the SEC Women's Basketball Tournament with a 112-78 blowout loss to No. 4 LSU. The loss came a day after OU had to overcome a slow start to beat No. 12 Florida 82-64 to advance to the quarterfinal, and although different results, the same problem plagued the Sooners in both games.
Although extremely talented as a top-10 team most of the season, there was fear that inexperience would be the Sooners' weakness once games started to matter the most in March. That had been a consistent issue all season when an opponent matched OU's talent level for a big game, as the Sooners are 1-7 against top-10 teams this season after a second deficit to LSU.
It then took just one game into the postseason for OU head coach Jennie Baranczyk to confirm that inexperience will be something the Sooners will have to overcome throughout March Madness to get deeper than last year's Sweet 16 run, or even match it.
Inexperience already haunting OU women in SEC Tournament
"This is a first for half of our team," Baranczyk said after the Florida win. "We're still really young. This is their first SEC Tournament, and you could see that in the first half. You could see that we came out excited, then all of a sudden it was like we're all panicking. So we just need to steady up, and I think we obviously have really good leadership, but we're still young."
Of the 11 players on OU's 2025-26 roster, seven are freshmen or sophomores with little experience, especially in the postseason. Freshman Aaliyah Chavez has started every game this season as the only rookie in OU's starting lineup, but the Sooners' key bench contributors include two freshmen in Brooklyn Stewart and Keziah Lofton, and sophomore Caya Smith, who appeared in only 17 games last year. Sophomore Zya Vann also starts.
Florida was down by just two at halftime before the Sooners pulled away in the second half once nerves settled. Against a team as dominant as LSU, though, OU couldn't recover after getting in a 12-3 deficit within the first two minutes and never led as the game got out of hand.
As a projected top-4 seed for the NCAA Tournament, the Sooners will have the benefit of home-court advantage and a much weaker foe in their first outing in the big dance. However, a slow start and letting a lower-seeded opponent stick around is the formula for upsets in March Madness.
"It was a fun experience, especially it being my first one, but we lost today against a great team, but at the same time, we're gonna take it and we're gonna learn from it," Chavez said.