Porter Moser's Sooners appear to be dancing, do your best to contain your excitement
It appears coach Porter Moser’s Sooner men are heading back to the NCAA tournament after a two-year absence.
Barely.
It depends on your bracketologist of choice just how easily they'll get there, while one would have you believe they’ll be fortunate to get the call at all.
That would be ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, who lists Oklahoma among his last four teams in the field and that means, if he’s right, you won’t have to wait until Thursday or Friday to watch the Sooners play their first-round game, but you’ll get to watch them Tuesday or Wednesday, in Dayton, fighting just to get a spot in the first round.
Good thing it’s a 68-team party.
In the short run, at least.
CBS Sports’ Jerry Palm and Fox Sports’ Mike DeCourcy like OU slightly more than that.
Palm has the Sooners receiving a No. 10 seed, facing Boise State in Salt Lake City in the West Regional. And though DeCourcy doesn’t attempt to pick geography, he also has the Sooners a No. 10 seed, though in the South Regional, facing Washington State.
Two things.
One, presuming OU indeed gets the call, don’t pretend it’s some sort of terrific success story.
This season’s been the the third straight Moser’s had to rebuild a roster; the second of three the Sooners have gotten off to a wonderful start only to stagger to the finish; and the third straight the product Moser’s put on the floor, for all his offseason lip service about wanting to be more athletic, to run, to cash in some easy points, has failed to entertain those watching and, presumedly, those playing, too … which only makes it harder to keep a roster together in the first place.
Two, if not for the confluence of several factors having nothing to do with Moser, one has to believe he’d have no job to come back to in Norman next season. Unless, that is, men’s basketball simply isn’t the priority it used to be at OU.
Because, even as hardwood Bedlam appears headed toward hiatus as the two programs move into two very different conferences, Oklahoma State’s cratering program has taken real heat off Moser’s middling one.
Because, headed into a new conference, OU’s powers that be may well see continuity as the best chance at immediate SEC success, rather than new and better leadership.
Because, given the NIL, players-as-free-agents, Wild West nature of modern collegiate athletics, it’s become harder to judge everything, including where a Big 12-soon-to-be-in-the-SEC basketball program ought to be three seasons into a new regime.
Yet, something’s wrong when your MO is to regress rather than improve, when you get less and less from you’re believed-to-be best players as the season goes along and when you spend all your time trying to overcome terrible starts to what seems like every game.
Moser tells a different story.
“We are going to be at full strength by this weekend … We have zero quad 2,3 or 4 losses in the best conference in the country,” he said following OU’s bounce from the Big 12 tourney. “You look at our defense, we were 31 going into the game and TCU has one of the best offenses, so we could end up a top-30 defense. Our offense is in the top 50.”
Moser will also tell you how the Sooners were 18-6 before injuries struck.
Falling 77-70 to the Horned Frogs on Wednesday, OU was without Rivaldo Soares, Javian McCollum and John Hugley.
“This team is very close,” Moser said. “They’re very, very hungry.”
If only it could play like it, say, to the first media timeout.
Still, it looks like OU’s in and, decent chance, won’t have to win a game in Dayton to reach the main draw.
Too bad, a season like this one’s bound to be spun into some kind of triumph.
Too bad, even if OU’s unlikely to hold a basketball coach to the standards of Billy Tubbs and Kelvin Sampson, nor does it appear willing to demand the type of success Lon Kruger achieved. Kruger never earned a conference crown, but went to seven of nine NCAA tournaments, reached two Sweet 16s and a Final Four.
Does anybody really believe Moser can do that, coaching the way he coaches, his team playing the way it plays?
But they’ll be dancing.
By the middle of the week or the end of it, the Sooners will have returned to the NCAA tournament.
Celebrate.
If you want to.
Not getting into this year's NCAA wouldn't be the worst thing to happen for OU mens basketball. What would be infinitely worse would be that a berth might mean the extension of a Porter Moser tenure at OU. And that dog just won't hunt. OU administration/Sports Dept/Joe Castiglione have to decide whether to play ball or drop the sport. The way they're going about it now is like there's a huge money crunch, and we can't really afford a real HC. So it's good reading your measured words today concerning the many flaws of Moser.