Sooner04
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DISCLAIMER: These thoughts are not from a professional. They are from an unabashed Sooner BBall fanatic whose glasses are tinted heavily crimson. I’m not a coach, I’m not an analyst, I’m just a fan who used to write and misses the task. My knowledge of the X’s and O’s of the sport is tenuous at best. My predictions often prove folly. I once fell hard for Ray Willis. But I do love my Sooners hoopsters, often much too much. Feel free to critique but, please, be gentle.
Six years is a long time.
On March 12, 1979, Dave Bliss led his Big 8 champion Sooners into a sweet 16 matchup with Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores in Cincinnati. Six years later he guided SMU to a 5-seed in the NCAA Tournament and an appearance in the round of 32. Hello, Jon Koncak!
On April 2, 1988, Billy Tubbs took in a view higher than any OU hoops squad in the modern era after defeating Arizona in Kemper Arena to reach the NCAA final. Six years later he oversaw a home drubbing by Vanderbilt and Billy McCaffrey in the first round of the NIT before packing his bags for the HC position at TCU.
On March 30, 2002, Kelvin Sampson rode into Atlanta with the hottest brigade since Sherman torched the place in hopes of securing Oklahoma its first NC in college basketball. Six years later he was run out of Bloomington on a rail after the curtain was pulled back on the shady recruiting of Eric Gordon.
On April 2, 2016, Lon Kruger brought to Houston a sharp-shooting band of guards and the very real hope that our missile-guided snipers would be enough to cut down the nets at the Final Four. Six years later Lon has decamped for the desert and we.....well......we're wandering in the desert.
Six years IS a long time, but it can also pass in a blink. My life today is very different than it was the night Villanova opened our stomachs, grabbed our intestines and squeezed the **** out of us, but when you step back and look at our overall performance as a program you'll see that we've regressed considerably. How much? Let's have a look.
I was born under the sign of Tisdale. I attended the Irvine game in utero. I spent a good portion of my life knowing nothing but successful Sooner basketball. There were ebbs and flows, sure, but the overall arc bent toward us being good. Better than good, really. For the first 25 years of my life you could make a legitimate case that we were a top-20 basketball program. Are we that now? No. I don't think so. And where this criteria is most evident is our descension from the upper echelon of our conference.
I travel a lot for work, and I spend a good amount of time staring out the windshield thinking about OU Basketball. I've been doing this for a while, and it was on one of those lonely drives years ago I came up with what I believe constitutes a successful season for the Sooner hoopsters. The parameters have shifted a few times with the changing conference schedules, but here's the gist: a white shirt in the Conference Tournament quarterfinals and a white shirt in the NCAA Round of 64. Or, to be more specific:
1983-1996: Top 4 in the Big 8
1997-2011: Top 4 in the Big 12
2012-Present: Top 4 in the 10-team league
Too often fans overshoot their expectations. "I want to be competing for the Final Four every year." Nonsense. That's not our lane. I'm happy if we can have a run to the Sweet 16 every four years. Anything beyond that is gravy and more in line with what we've come to expect from our past results. But in regards to my expectation at the start of every season, the following are the years we achieved that bar and the years we did not:
SUCCESS:
83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 00, 01, 02, 03, 05, 06, 08, 09, 14, 15, 16, 20(??)
FAILURE:
91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 04, 07, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22
Looking at that in timeline form, you can see how rough it's been since Kelvin left. In my lifetime, I'm 40 (I'm a man), we were up 16-8 when Kelvin bolted. The crummy years have caught up quick since then, outpacing the successes 10-6, and that's being generous to the 2020 season where, I assume, we would've been an 8-seed or so in the Dance.
But it's those last six seasons that have really hurt. Check out the total conference wins by team:
KU - 84
Baylor - 72
Tech - 61
WVU - 51
Texas - 50
O-State - 48
OU - 45
KSU - 45
TCU - 42
Iowa State - 35
Depending on how badly we crater from here on out, we're looking down the barrel of being 9th or 10th in conference wins in what will then be a seven-year span. That hurts. Even still, look deeper at the standings and you'll get an even bleaker picture. The following is a list of how often each team has finished with a record even or better than ours in those six seasons:
KU - 6/6
Baylor - 6/6
Tech - 6/6
Texas - 5/6
WVU - 4/6
O-State - 4/6
TCU - 4/6
KSU - 3/6
Iowa State - 3/6
We've run roughshod over nobody! Even the worst teams of the league are running alongside us half the time or more! It paints a pretty ugly picture as to the rot that has permeated the program over the last 6+ years.
In the Basin and Range province of the western United States, there is a phenomenon affecting the climate called a rain shadow. The gist: a large mountain range prevents the cooling moisture of the windward side from ascending over to the leeward side. The NCAA Tournament is a rain shadow, and it has become so monolithic to the sport of college basketball that it can skew the perception of a program's success. Thanks in large part to crafty scheduling and wonky new metrics (Quads-spit, NET-horsehockey), we've made a couple of trips to the Dance in the last six years. We've even snagged a couple of wins in the process. But I think tying everything to a squad's performance in the NCAA Tournament takes away from a team's accomplishments during the regular season.
Consider this:
1. Do I have to discredit winning the Big 8 with a 13-1 record in 1984 just because Roosevelt Chapman went bananas?
2. Does the win over Pitt in Tucson wipe the slate clean for a disappointing, senior-laden team that leaked oil all over the place down the stretch in 1987?
3. Does that bastard Rick Fox keep me from remembering fondly the 1990 team that finished the season ranked #1?
4. Am I supposed to forget the undefeated home slate of 1995 just because Manhattan wiped us off the Pyramid floor?
5. Could there be a bigger bunch of underachievers than the 1999 squad....or does a hot weekend in Milwaukee get the 13-seed off the hook?
6. Is Kelvin's first Big 12 tournament winner in 2001 forever stained because Hollis gained a tooth in a collapse versus Indiana State?
7. Is our last regular season conference net cutting too solemn to recall just because Utah splashed down on our heads in 2005?
7. Does the ND State debacle prevent me from fondly recalling the 2014 team, which came within a chickenhawk breath of sharing the league title?
I say "NO" on all counts. I say each part is a cog to brewing a successful season, and I've been disappointed watching us flounder.
In February of 2020, not long before the pandemic shut down everything, the stars aligned and I was able to make a solo trip to Stillwater for a big matchup with the Aggies. It was a year typical of what we'd come to expect from Lon's post-Final Four teams: some early success, a few February face plants, and a conference record at or below .500. But I sailed for Stillwater confident that we'd secure a road win that would book us passage to the NCAA Tournament for sure. Few teams have ever come out flatter, and we never mounted much of anything on either side of the floor. I got lucky and was given a ticket in the suite of the Chickasaw Nation by a lady who had a spare, and I've held onto that ticket ever since. It's a talisman for me, for that was the day I lost a good chunk of my emotional investment in the product. It just seemed like I was watching the same team get the same results year after year after year. Nothing since that day has dispelled that notion, and we sit here in January of 2023 looking much the same or, most likely, a tick worse. Me? I'm tired of it.
The landscape of college hoops has changed tectonically. It's extraordinarily different now than it was when we began our slide six-plus years ago. In my lifetime we've won on the backs of Oklahoma stars and JUCO gunslingers. We've depended on baseball players from Hammon and hombres from Chihuahua. We've climbed to #1 alongside Skeeter's six-shooters and Buddy's buckets. We've gone to the Final Four thanks to backcourts from Midland JUCO and St. Augustine HS. But what the hell do we do now? Our fans will come if we win, but they'll no-show in droves at the sight of a mediocre product. And our nearly 50-year-old arena? What's the answer there? Me? I'm worried.
I'll leave you with two of the sadder stats I compiled during my research into our mediocre slide:
1. From 1979 through 2016, the longest we've gone without being a 5-seed or higher in the NCAA Tournament is four seasons. We've done that three times (80-83, 96-99, 10-13). The current streak now sits at six seasons.....with no end in sight.
2. In the last six seasons of Big 12 conference basketball, only two programs have failed to win 10 games in a season: Oklahoma and TCU. Five more Frog wins this year, and we stand alone.
Time was there was only one league foe we looked up to: Kansas. We were unquestionably #2 for a generation, but we have slipped. Considerably.. What's your standard? And where do we go from here?
Thank you for your time.
Six years is a long time.
On March 12, 1979, Dave Bliss led his Big 8 champion Sooners into a sweet 16 matchup with Larry Bird's Indiana State Sycamores in Cincinnati. Six years later he guided SMU to a 5-seed in the NCAA Tournament and an appearance in the round of 32. Hello, Jon Koncak!
On April 2, 1988, Billy Tubbs took in a view higher than any OU hoops squad in the modern era after defeating Arizona in Kemper Arena to reach the NCAA final. Six years later he oversaw a home drubbing by Vanderbilt and Billy McCaffrey in the first round of the NIT before packing his bags for the HC position at TCU.
On March 30, 2002, Kelvin Sampson rode into Atlanta with the hottest brigade since Sherman torched the place in hopes of securing Oklahoma its first NC in college basketball. Six years later he was run out of Bloomington on a rail after the curtain was pulled back on the shady recruiting of Eric Gordon.
On April 2, 2016, Lon Kruger brought to Houston a sharp-shooting band of guards and the very real hope that our missile-guided snipers would be enough to cut down the nets at the Final Four. Six years later Lon has decamped for the desert and we.....well......we're wandering in the desert.
Six years IS a long time, but it can also pass in a blink. My life today is very different than it was the night Villanova opened our stomachs, grabbed our intestines and squeezed the **** out of us, but when you step back and look at our overall performance as a program you'll see that we've regressed considerably. How much? Let's have a look.
I was born under the sign of Tisdale. I attended the Irvine game in utero. I spent a good portion of my life knowing nothing but successful Sooner basketball. There were ebbs and flows, sure, but the overall arc bent toward us being good. Better than good, really. For the first 25 years of my life you could make a legitimate case that we were a top-20 basketball program. Are we that now? No. I don't think so. And where this criteria is most evident is our descension from the upper echelon of our conference.
I travel a lot for work, and I spend a good amount of time staring out the windshield thinking about OU Basketball. I've been doing this for a while, and it was on one of those lonely drives years ago I came up with what I believe constitutes a successful season for the Sooner hoopsters. The parameters have shifted a few times with the changing conference schedules, but here's the gist: a white shirt in the Conference Tournament quarterfinals and a white shirt in the NCAA Round of 64. Or, to be more specific:
1983-1996: Top 4 in the Big 8
1997-2011: Top 4 in the Big 12
2012-Present: Top 4 in the 10-team league
Too often fans overshoot their expectations. "I want to be competing for the Final Four every year." Nonsense. That's not our lane. I'm happy if we can have a run to the Sweet 16 every four years. Anything beyond that is gravy and more in line with what we've come to expect from our past results. But in regards to my expectation at the start of every season, the following are the years we achieved that bar and the years we did not:
SUCCESS:
83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 95, 00, 01, 02, 03, 05, 06, 08, 09, 14, 15, 16, 20(??)
FAILURE:
91, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 04, 07, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22
Looking at that in timeline form, you can see how rough it's been since Kelvin left. In my lifetime, I'm 40 (I'm a man), we were up 16-8 when Kelvin bolted. The crummy years have caught up quick since then, outpacing the successes 10-6, and that's being generous to the 2020 season where, I assume, we would've been an 8-seed or so in the Dance.
But it's those last six seasons that have really hurt. Check out the total conference wins by team:
KU - 84
Baylor - 72
Tech - 61
WVU - 51
Texas - 50
O-State - 48
OU - 45
KSU - 45
TCU - 42
Iowa State - 35
Depending on how badly we crater from here on out, we're looking down the barrel of being 9th or 10th in conference wins in what will then be a seven-year span. That hurts. Even still, look deeper at the standings and you'll get an even bleaker picture. The following is a list of how often each team has finished with a record even or better than ours in those six seasons:
KU - 6/6
Baylor - 6/6
Tech - 6/6
Texas - 5/6
WVU - 4/6
O-State - 4/6
TCU - 4/6
KSU - 3/6
Iowa State - 3/6
We've run roughshod over nobody! Even the worst teams of the league are running alongside us half the time or more! It paints a pretty ugly picture as to the rot that has permeated the program over the last 6+ years.
In the Basin and Range province of the western United States, there is a phenomenon affecting the climate called a rain shadow. The gist: a large mountain range prevents the cooling moisture of the windward side from ascending over to the leeward side. The NCAA Tournament is a rain shadow, and it has become so monolithic to the sport of college basketball that it can skew the perception of a program's success. Thanks in large part to crafty scheduling and wonky new metrics (Quads-spit, NET-horsehockey), we've made a couple of trips to the Dance in the last six years. We've even snagged a couple of wins in the process. But I think tying everything to a squad's performance in the NCAA Tournament takes away from a team's accomplishments during the regular season.
Consider this:
1. Do I have to discredit winning the Big 8 with a 13-1 record in 1984 just because Roosevelt Chapman went bananas?
2. Does the win over Pitt in Tucson wipe the slate clean for a disappointing, senior-laden team that leaked oil all over the place down the stretch in 1987?
3. Does that bastard Rick Fox keep me from remembering fondly the 1990 team that finished the season ranked #1?
4. Am I supposed to forget the undefeated home slate of 1995 just because Manhattan wiped us off the Pyramid floor?
5. Could there be a bigger bunch of underachievers than the 1999 squad....or does a hot weekend in Milwaukee get the 13-seed off the hook?
6. Is Kelvin's first Big 12 tournament winner in 2001 forever stained because Hollis gained a tooth in a collapse versus Indiana State?
7. Is our last regular season conference net cutting too solemn to recall just because Utah splashed down on our heads in 2005?
7. Does the ND State debacle prevent me from fondly recalling the 2014 team, which came within a chickenhawk breath of sharing the league title?
I say "NO" on all counts. I say each part is a cog to brewing a successful season, and I've been disappointed watching us flounder.
In February of 2020, not long before the pandemic shut down everything, the stars aligned and I was able to make a solo trip to Stillwater for a big matchup with the Aggies. It was a year typical of what we'd come to expect from Lon's post-Final Four teams: some early success, a few February face plants, and a conference record at or below .500. But I sailed for Stillwater confident that we'd secure a road win that would book us passage to the NCAA Tournament for sure. Few teams have ever come out flatter, and we never mounted much of anything on either side of the floor. I got lucky and was given a ticket in the suite of the Chickasaw Nation by a lady who had a spare, and I've held onto that ticket ever since. It's a talisman for me, for that was the day I lost a good chunk of my emotional investment in the product. It just seemed like I was watching the same team get the same results year after year after year. Nothing since that day has dispelled that notion, and we sit here in January of 2023 looking much the same or, most likely, a tick worse. Me? I'm tired of it.
The landscape of college hoops has changed tectonically. It's extraordinarily different now than it was when we began our slide six-plus years ago. In my lifetime we've won on the backs of Oklahoma stars and JUCO gunslingers. We've depended on baseball players from Hammon and hombres from Chihuahua. We've climbed to #1 alongside Skeeter's six-shooters and Buddy's buckets. We've gone to the Final Four thanks to backcourts from Midland JUCO and St. Augustine HS. But what the hell do we do now? Our fans will come if we win, but they'll no-show in droves at the sight of a mediocre product. And our nearly 50-year-old arena? What's the answer there? Me? I'm worried.
I'll leave you with two of the sadder stats I compiled during my research into our mediocre slide:
1. From 1979 through 2016, the longest we've gone without being a 5-seed or higher in the NCAA Tournament is four seasons. We've done that three times (80-83, 96-99, 10-13). The current streak now sits at six seasons.....with no end in sight.
2. In the last six seasons of Big 12 conference basketball, only two programs have failed to win 10 games in a season: Oklahoma and TCU. Five more Frog wins this year, and we stand alone.
Time was there was only one league foe we looked up to: Kansas. We were unquestionably #2 for a generation, but we have slipped. Considerably.. What's your standard? And where do we go from here?
Thank you for your time.
haha 
