Sooners' march topped out in February
Jennie Baranczyk must figure out a way to get her team's best in the brackets
For a third straight season, I know why Oklahoma lost its bid to reach the Sweet 16 for the first time in 11 seasons.
What I don’t know is why the why happened, nor, exactly, what Sooner women’s coach Jennie Baranczyk is going to do about it, though it ought to be something.
It ought to be something because no team that shares the Big 12 regular season crown one season and owns it outright the next should miss out on the Sweet 16 in both of those seasons.
It ought to be something, too, because no coach who’s enjoyed that kind of regular season success should accept the kind of drop off Baranczyk’s squad offered beginning the moment it took down Texas, Feb. 28, to claim the conference crown, a drop that continued into March Madness, where a team that should have been playing its best basketball of the season instead played nothing remotely close to it
Anyway, playing on its home court in Bloomington, because that’s the way they do it in the women’s game, No. 4 seed Indiana beat No. 5 seed OU 75-68 in front of more than 12,000 Hoosier fans.
The crowd, though, did not appear to rattle the Sooners.
For a change, OU finally got off to a decent start — it was 19-19 after a quarter — and took care of the ball well enough, committing a reasonable 11 turnovers, or just nine if you take away two horrendous away-from-the-ball offensive fouls committed by Sahara Williams, who negligently limited herself to three first-half minutes as a result.
No, the Sooners lost because their best players did not show up as they had most of the season, losing their confidence and their shot at the most inopportune time.
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