What's Your Standard?

[WichitaSooner]

The landscape of college basketball is so drastically different now. No other coach except Moser, well maybe Lon a little towards the end, has had to deal with things that radically alter how to build a team- the transfer portal, a huge issue- think our team is not better this year if we still had Mo and Harkless? Two major contributors who left to play somewhere else, doubt they would have if it meant sitting out like it used to. And NIL- recruting a kid who can really play on the idea of playing for a great school and a once great program isn’t enough any more. These same factors have combined to make KSU what they are this year, unfortunately in the opposite direction for us. Next year is make or break I think. We have some talented young guys and will have at least two more next year. If we can manage to bring in a transfer or two, who knows where we could go.

We’d be better with Mo, especially if we would have him rather than Bam. Harkless is having about as bad a year you’ll see from an offensive efficiency standpoint for a guard. I don’t think he would help us at all. You’re right that Moser is the first of our coaches to have to deal with the portal, but that’s true for every coach around the country. The best coaches adapt quickly regardless of whether they like the rules. And he knew the portal was a thing before he accepted the job, so it’s not like he could reasonably claim to be surprised. Teams that play good ball, have a competitive NIL situation, and treat their players well will probably see less roster turnover than other programs, but everyone will deal with it to some degree.

 

[OUSKINS]

Don’t have much to add other than to say, as always, 04 nailed it…eloquently and entertainingly so. Good work.

 

[mict085]

that is not who tcu and baylor are any more

baylor is a national super power

and tcu did the same thing to KU in allen field house a couple days before they did it to us

If baylor can do it, so can OU. However, we need full investment from the top down and we’re not getting that. Until we do, no point in wasting time on OU basketball anymore. It’s a **** show right now and will continue until we decide to fix it.

 

[BCSooners]

The 2 regime's feel very similar to me right now. I think Tanner Groves is equal to Capel's Nick Thompson. I do think Moser is recruiting better young talent than Capel ever did and none of Moser's kids are getting arrested or dropping out of school and I don't think Moser will cheat. So those are differences for sure but the feel of that TCU game was very Capel-esque to me.

This is so bad that laughable doesn’t do it justice.

 

[sanguinetti]

Personally, i would add the Brian Cardinal/Purdue loss to 04's list, in original post. they were a pretty good team but we were the better one and our whole side of the bracket had many upsets. Sooners could have made some real noise that year.

I was at the Irvine game as well. just a kid. I couldn't talk to anyone for about 2 hours after the round of 8 loss to Memphis (State) and Keith Lee....though it was Andre Turner who beat us.

Since then, my standard line was I expected to make the tournament every season. to make the second weekend i considered a "successful" season....though, in reality, i didn't expect it every season. benchmark.

I'm a fan of Kruger on balance, but the stretch of later Lon years where we were penciled into the 8/9 game wore me down some....haven't given up on Moser but something different needs to happen moving forward.

 

[Big Old Booger]

Personally, i would add the Brian Cardinal/Purdue loss to 04's list, in original post. they were a pretty good team but we were the better one and our whole side of the bracket had many upsets. Sooners could have made some real noise that year.

I was at the Irvine game as well. just a kid. I couldn't talk to anyone for about 2 hours after the round of 8 loss to Memphis (State) and Keith Lee....though it was Andre Turner who beat us.

Since then, my standard line was I expected to make the tournament every season. to make the second weekend i considered a "successful" season....though, in reality, i didn't expect it every season. benchmark.

I'm a fan of Kruger on balance, but the stretch of later Lon years where we were penciled into the 8/9 game wore me down some....haven't given up on Moser but something different needs to happen moving forward.

The UC Irvine game was in the NIT after the 82 season, the last season before Wayman arrived in Norman. We went on to win at ORU the next game and then beat Dayton and advanced to the NIT final 4 and lost to Bradley.

The loss to Keith Lee in the Elite 8 was 3 years later -- 1985. I cried after that game. I cried 3 times for OU basketball, the other 2 were when Wayman announced he was entering the NBA draft and when we lost to KU in 88.

 

[Abe]

Good write up. But! The basketball recruiting we grew up with is gone. Unless we, fans, businesses etc. are willing to pony up $100,000 to 200,000 for top talent you are wishing for things as they were not as they are.
These kids all know each other, what they get in nil, etc. and in the end it is a financial issue. We pay nil to every player on the team but 5* players and top transfers come with a hefty price. That is the sad state of the game.

 

[sanguinetti]

The UC Irvine game was in the NIT after the 82 season, the last season before Wayman arrived in Norman. We went on to win at ORU the next game and then beat Dayton and advanced to the NIT final 4 and lost to Bradley.

The loss to Keith Lee in the Elite 8 was 3 years later -- 1985. I cried after that game. I cried 3 times for OU basketball, the other 2 were when Wayman announced he was entering the NBA draft and when we lost to KU in 88.

oh, i know the difference between the NIT year (eventual loss to Dick Versace and Bradley) and the Memphis State loss.

i was just riffing here and there. Chucky Barnett was my first fave player....

 

[opsooner]

The UC Irvine game was in the NIT after the 82 season, the last season before Wayman arrived in Norman. We went on to win at ORU the next game and then beat Dayton and advanced to the NIT final 4 and lost to Bradley.

The loss to Keith Lee in the Elite 8 was 3 years later -- 1985. I cried after that game. I cried 3 times for OU basketball, the other 2 were when Wayman announced he was entering the NBA draft and when we lost to KU in 88.

Yea. I think Memphis game was when TMac threw a cup of water on ref after the game!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Sooner04]

I appreciate the input, folks. A lot of these stats and examples have been rolling around in my head for quite a while. And although I'll agree the bottom hasn't fallen out like it did under Capel, I just keep coming back to the point that we've dropped off significantly. Perhaps I hold the Tubbs/Sampson years in higher esteem than I should because they had such an effect on my formative years, but I also want to defend them from ever being sold short. We were really, really good for a long time. And now, we're not. I understand the conference is really good. But we aren't carrying any of the water.

At what point do you consider that the ship may have sailed? A few historical examples close to home:

Missouri: Three Elite 8 appearances in 15 years, the latter two after the Norm Stewart glory years. They haven't won an NCAA game since 2010.

K-State: Between 1975 and 1988, three Elite 8 appearances as well, When they trudged off the floor after losing to KU in the Silverdome did they ever contemplate that it would be 22 years before they ever again made it that far?

Arkansas: Three Final Fours and an Elite 8 in six seasons between 1990 and 1995. Won it all and played for it the next year. Sweet 16 in 1996 and it's 25 years before they get out of the first weekend again.


I based my research on the prior six years, but seven's looking awfully similar. Lon deserves all the credit in the world for building a very competitive program after the Capel fiasco. We got better every year until we didn't, and that downtick has continued to fester with no end in sight. Six years is a long time, but so is seven. When does it end?

It makes me sad when we go 7-11 in the league and it gets bantered around that we deserve to get in after a hot 48 hours in KC.

It makes me sad when we lose the home opener to a Texas directional school and I have to read that, by the end of the year, that'll probably be a quad-2 loss......whatever that means.

We lose at home a lot. And that makes me sad.
We are not feared on the road at all. And that makes me sad.

I love OU Basketball. But with NIL and shifting conferences and players coming and going in droves I don't know what the hell I'm looking at any more. Time was I could tell you the high school attended by every player on the roster. Now team content will fly out across social media and I wouldn't know the guy from Rashaad Carruth.

Depresses the hell out of me.

 

[thebigabd]

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 became a fan of OU basketball when I was an 11-12 year old kid in the mid 90's... flipping around the channels from my home in Broken Arrow and found an OU basketball game featuring a guy named Ryan Minor. My dad had already got me into watching OU football and listening to games on the radio, and my uncle had taken me to lots of TU basketball games at that point... so I stayed tuned in and watched the game. I was hooked after that game.

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.

I have performed this same exercise... and have consistently maintained that the following is the standard for OU basketball. They don't all have to happen in the same season, but the benchmarks for success are:

• Achieve a first round bye in the Big 12 tournament
• Be in a position to have a legitimate chance to win the Big 12 tournament
• Make the NCAA Tournament
• Be in or hang around the top 25 rankings

I really think thats the standard. Teams are built to be competitive in their league. If you are Colorado State, the goal should be one of the best teams in the Mountain West. If you are Missouri State, the goal is to win he Missouri Valley Tournament so you can get in the NCAA Tournament. If you are Oklahoma, your goal is to beat your conference peers, which allows everything else to take care of itself. If you are competitive in your league, you will likely be ranked, you will be in a position to get that first round bye, you will make the NCAA Tournament, etc. And.... on some years, you will cut down the nets in Kansas City.

Get the occasional Sweet 16 banner and beyond, and you're doing great at Oklahoma. But the Big 12 Championships, Tournament Championships, consistent success in rankings and what not are more important than what happens in the NCAA Tournament short of winning the thing or making a Final Four.

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.

Yea, thats no good.

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.

Rot is a perfect word.

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 don't think the calculus has changed that much... Has it changed at all? Of course it has, with the transfer portal especially. All of OU's coaches since Sampson have been making the exact same recruiting mistakes. They are mistakes in recruiting the region and mistakes in roster construction.

Sampson said to win at Oklahoma, you had to recruit the regional talent and win the juco game. Second, you had to construct a team that had certain characteristics. He described where you recruited perhaps not the best available player, but you needed 2-3 guys who were really good shooters. You need 2 guys who could really attack the rim.. You needed some size and some really good rebounders... You needed a certain type of point guard. In terms of overall talent, he said in OU's best years, he had 3 really good players, and the rest of the dudes filled roles. In good but not great years, he had 2 really good players, and the rest of the dudes filled roles, etc.

OU's roster construction lacks all of that kind of logic. It's a "take the best guy I can get" approach, and they figure out the best combinations for the team after the fact. That ain't gonna produce a consistent winner at Oklahoma.

The next very successful coach at OU will be a person who heeds that logic... OU is not going to overwhelm anyone with talent in most years. In the years where that happened, it was insane local talent like Blake Griffin and Buddy Hield (Wichita, KS) that allowed it. OU needs thoughtful roster construction, and to hit the regional recruiting like your life depends it. Even the jucos are there. I continually demonstrate that year after year.

As for the arena.... the answer is pretty simple. Build one. No more than 10,000 seats. Make it suited for basketball. Make it modern, yet simple. McCarthy Athletic Center in Gonzaga, Trojan Arena in Troy, Alabama, etc are some relatively recent examples. On campus, constructed specifically for the basketball programs, not multi-purpose shared venues with the city, etc. Oklahoma State has this with GIA... Iowa State has this with Hilton... Kansas has it...

 

[Big Old Booger]

that is not who tcu and baylor are any more

baylor is a national super power

and tcu did the same thing to KU in allen field house a couple days before they did it to us

You just made my point. Baylor and TCU elevated when we started to recede (in the Big 12). I think one could make the point they elevated BECAUSE we receded. I can remember when beating them was a foregone conclusion. Now it's the reverse, which pains me to say.

 

[OUsky]

Today is OUr standard.

 

[Swans]

Today is OUr standard.

This!!

 

[Romulus]

I appreciate the input, folks. A lot of these stats and examples have been rolling around in my head for quite a while. And although I'll agree the bottom hasn't fallen out like it did under Capel, I just keep coming back to the point that we've dropped off significantly. Perhaps I hold the Tubbs/Sampson years in higher esteem than I should because they had such an effect on my formative years, but I also want to defend them from ever being sold short. We were really, really good for a long time. And now, we're not. I understand the conference is really good. But we aren't carrying any of the water.

At what point do you consider that the ship may have sailed? A few historical examples close to home:

Missouri: Three Elite 8 appearances in 15 years, the latter two after the Norm Stewart glory years. They haven't won an NCAA game since 2010.

K-State: Between 1975 and 1988, three Elite 8 appearances as well, When they trudged off the floor after losing to KU in the Silverdome did they ever contemplate that it would be 22 years before they ever again made it that far?

Arkansas: Three Final Fours and an Elite 8 in six seasons between 1990 and 1995. Won it all and played for it the next year. Sweet 16 in 1996 and it's 25 years before they get out of the first weekend again.


I based my research on the prior six years, but seven's looking awfully similar. Lon deserves all the credit in the world for building a very competitive program after the Capel fiasco. We got better every year until we didn't, and that downtick has continued to fester with no end in sight. Six years is a long time, but so is seven. When does it end?

It makes me sad when we go 7-11 in the league and it gets bantered around that we deserve to get in after a hot 48 hours in KC.

It makes me sad when we lose the home opener to a Texas directional school and I have to read that, by the end of the year, that'll probably be a quad-2 loss......whatever that means.

We lose at home a lot. And that makes me sad.
We are not feared on the road at all. And that makes me sad.

I love OU Basketball. But with NIL and shifting conferences and players coming and going in droves I don't know what the hell I'm looking at any more. Time was I could tell you the high school attended by every player on the roster. Now team content will fly out across social media and I wouldn't know the guy from Rashaad Carruth.

Depresses the hell out of me.

I've enjoyed your posts on this thread my friend. I miss the passion I used to have for OU basketball. I had no idea how good we had it when Kelvin was here. I loved OU basketball back then and still wanted more! I remember arguing with KLM (Keith Langford's Mom) on the KU boards and back then OU could go toe to toe with anyone and usually out tough them. I remember you and I arguing over David Godbolt! How spoiled we were! I never liked Capel, was apathetic about Lon and now I have zero idea who any player on the team is anymore. I could almost quote the recruiting classes from the early 2000s still.

I think this coach is an odd fit for the school and has been from the beginning. KSU went after an asst that knows this conference, can recruit and knows Texas inside and out. Joe C flubbed this hire. Its hard for the fans to get behind the program when its obvious the admin doesn't support it the way it should.

 

[WTSooner]

Its hard for the fans to get behind the program when its obvious the admin doesn't support it the way it should.

I agree that it was probably a bad hire, but it wasn't indicative of the Admin not being behind the program. Quite the opposite. Moser was somewhat of a safe hire, and certainly a hire that played well in the perception of college basketball fans and OU fans alike.

But I agree, it was never a good fit.

 

[vbdad]

All really good stuff and I largely agree, things ideally would be better considering historical success and especially post-2016 have been disappointing. View OU basketball through 4-year cycles, ideally I’d like the team to never be truly awful each year but nationally competitive (sweet 16ish) at least once a cycle. We haven’t been truly awful (although this team is on the precipice at least record wise) since 2017 so I guess that’s a win.

Hasn’t been elite, especially in-conference, but personally think the angst is magnified by how good the Big 12 has becomes since 2013 (I realize this isn’t a new observation). Even when I look at NET or KenPom and get the context, I’m used to the 2000s where the conference would always have a few awful teams and cushion the overall standings.

Broader question to me is how/why other Big 12 programs, in similar competitive circumstances but worse historical success, passed OU post-2013 and what can the Athletic Department do to emulate. I guess broadly it’s a lack of fan support but not sure how to capture the casual fan outside of winning consistently (chicken & egg argument there if that’s the case) especially when other non-football programs are doing so well. For example, I’m not saying softball has more of an audience than men’s basketball by any means but when that program is historically elite and guaranteed to have pretty high level success (and far more accessible with ESPN+) it’s easy to see casual fans not paying attention to the standard non-football draw which was men’s bball.

The Thunder started in 08 which is a few years before you mention lack of success from 2013. They have been a huge detriment for attendance and interest. When was the last time you heard anyone on the sports animal talk about OU or OSU basketball ? Especially with any knowledge of the teams.
I was a freshman the same year as Wayman. Basketball was fabulous for many years.

13-1 team was a loss in first game at ISU. Mark Wade later of UNLV played almost whole game with Billy trying to keep him in Norman. Believe he transferred the next week.
The Memphis loss was a killer. Andre Turner carried the ball on the winning basket. As in dribbled at head level.
Rick Fox was open because the guy setting screen on Patterson grabbed his jersey to keep him from blocking the shot. We were great that year.
Capel was a disaster.
Lon did a great job for us with no support from the athletic department. Compliance and Joe kept several big recruits from coming here. They had been burned a little by Kelvin and torched by Capel. It was a constant battle in all things not just recruits.
Jordan Woodard‘s illness was a killer the year after the final four. We weren’t going to be great but respectable. It was terrible for him but also disturbed the whole team.
Hopefully Moser can get it done. This team is so much better than last year.

 

[mict085]

that is not who tcu and baylor are any more

baylor is a national super power

and tcu did the same thing to KU in allen field house a couple days before they did it to us

If those teams can do it, become a national power, we can do it. We were a national power at times in the past and we can do it again. If Baylor can win a national title, we can too. It takes commitment from the top down tho.

 

[SoonerDutch]

The Thunder started in 08 which is a few years before you mention lack of success from 2013. They have been a huge detriment for attendance and interest. When was the last time you heard anyone on the sports animal talk about OU or OSU basketball ? Especially with any knowledge of the teams.
I was a freshman the same year as Wayman. Basketball was fabulous for many years.

13-1 team was a loss in first game at ISU. Mark Wade later of UNLV played almost whole game with Billy trying to keep him in Norman. Believe he transferred the next week.
The Memphis loss was a killer. Andre Turner carried the ball on the winning basket. As in dribbled at head level.
Rick Fox was open because the guy setting screen on Patterson grabbed his jersey to keep him from blocking the shot. We were great that year.
Capel was a disaster.
Lon did a great job for us with no support from the athletic department. Compliance and Joe kept several big recruits from coming here. They had been burned a little by Kelvin and torched by Capel. It was a constant battle in all things not just recruits.
Jordan Woodard‘s illness was a killer the year after the final four. We weren’t going to be great but respectable. It was terrible for him but also disturbed the whole team.
Hopefully Moser can get it done. This team is so much better than last year.

I don’t listen to local sports radio, that’s the last barometer I would use for casual fan interest personally. Would agree OKC has hurt fan interest but it’s pretty nationwide outside of traditional BBall powers.

 

[SoonerBounce13]

I remember doing a study years ago and I posted it to OU hoops. Attendance was much more correlated to the quality of play from OU than from the Thunder.