The Oklahoma women's basketball team all season has been on the cusp of being considered a serious contender to win a national championship, but time is winding down to get over the edge and reach that top tier of women's college basketball.
The No. 11 Sooners have four games left on their regular-season schedule, and the next two are against ranked teams to give Jennie Baranczyk's young squad one last opportunity to determine its realistic expectations heading into March Madness.
Sooners still have more to prove before March Madness
With two weeks left in the regular season, the Sooners are just barely in the mix to host NCAA Tournament games again at Lloyd Noble Center as a No. 4 seed. That home-court advantage was crucial in OU making the Sweet 16 last year before losing to future champion UConn, but with four of five starters returning and adding the No. 1 2025 recruit in the country in Aaliyah Chavez, a deeper run into the NCAA Tournament was expected in 2026. But as of now, the 2026 Sooners seem to be on par with those 2025 Sooners.
Teams with a star freshman leading the way usually take time to reach their full potential, but even with Chavez clearly living up to the hype and having All-American center Raegan Beers to take pressure off, the Sooners still haven't been able to overtake the teams at the top of women's college basketball, which is obviously required to get there yourself.
The Sooners are 19-6 overall and 7-5 in SEC play this season, but just 3-6 against teams that were inside the Associated Press Top 25 at the time. That mark dips to 1-5 against serious national contenders inside the top 10. Those are the type of teams the Sooners will meet in the Sweet 16 and beyond.
The outlier was a massive overtime upset of then-No. 2 South Carolina that sparked hope, but that was shortly followed by a pair of convincing losses to top-5 squads Texas and Vanderbilt. A loss to South Carolina also would have pushed OU's losing streak at the time to four games, so desperation helped fuel that upset before the season crashed.
OU's final stretch includes at No. 24 Georgia, vs. No. 21 Tennessee, vs. Arkansas and at Missouri. After back-to-back wins that include a 79-71 road victory over then-No. 23 Alabama in their last outing, the Sooners could enter the SEC Women's Basketball Tournament on a six-game winning streak, half of which would come against ranked teams.
That still wouldn't erase the Sooners' struggles against the top echelon, but there will be more of those chances for a potentially hot OU team in the loaded SEC Tournament to raise the stakes for itself in the NCAA Tournament. In two weeks, fans will know exactly what they should expect from the Sooners in March Madness.