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Wednesday’s loss to TCU was quite possibly the worst upset in KU’s history, but it was also notable as the first time KU had lost back-to-back games since 2006. Today’s 72-66 loss at Oklahoma takes them back to 2005, when they dropped consecutive games to Texas Tech, Iowa State and, yep, Oklahoma in February play.
Bill Self reached even farther back into the mists of time to describe his current team’s surprising streak of futility, saying that this team was the worst KU had put on the floor since James Naismith “lost to the YMCA.” Naismith did, in fact, lose to the Muscatine, Iowa YMCA in 1902 on his way to a 5-7 record, and Self’s hyperbole was clearly meant to sting his slumping team into action.
It didn’t work. The aura of invincibility the KU program has lorded over the Big 12 for nearly a decade has cracked, fractured, and fallen completely away during this bad stretch.
(via Kansas is turning back the clock, and not in a good way | CollegeBasketballTalk)
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Content Advisory: Sports -- Remembering the greatest Oklahoma basketball team ever
The Oklahoman’s Berry Tramel waxes nostalgic for the 1987-1988 Oklahoma Sooners that plowed through all comers — often by cartoonishly-high margins — before being upset by Danny Manning’s Kansas Jayhawks in the 1988 NCAA Tournament Final:
They pressed full court, created turnovers galore, shot quickly and played ferociously. The starting unit of Grace and Blaylock and Harvey Grant and Stacey King and Dave Sieger became so well-conditioned that by season’s end [Head Coach Billy] Tubbs rarely had to substitute, and the assault was never-ending.
There is nothing like it in college basketball anymore. The days of Nolan Richardson’s 40 minutes of Arkansas hell and Jerry Tarkanian’s Runnin’ Rebels and OU’s BillyBall are over. The game is pedestrian, played not by refined stars but by young prospects headed for the NBA after a college drive-thru.
I told Tubbs on Friday his ‘88 Sooners would beat Kentucky’s most recent national champ by 40 points.
“Fifty,” Tubbs said with that wry smile. “The game has turned into push and shove. It would be really hard to play like we did. We dictated the tempo of the game with our defense. Nobody really wants to get out and defend 100 percent of the floor anymore.
“The whole face of the game has changed. From a team standpoint, it would take a couple of years to learn to do what we did defensively.”
Much of that team (along with numerous other OU basketball alumni spanning from the 1940s to recent years) is back in Norman this weekend for the OU Legends/Alumni game, to be held at noon Saturday at Lloyd Noble Centre.
Say what you want to about Billy Tubbs, but I have to love a guy that once admonished a particularly fussy LNC crowd, “No matter how bad the officiating is, please stop throwing things on the floor!”
This is my era. I was a freshman at Kansas the year that Danny and the Miracles upset the Sooners, and I can attest that they were a blast to watch, however terrifying it was when they were playing your own favorite team. It was a championship-caliber team without a doubt.
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Wilt. Imagine trying to shoot over him?
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Blake and Taylor Griffin at OU.
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Oklahoma Sooners Men’s Basketball Fined 15K & Placed On Probation For Violations
NORMAN, Okla. — The NCAA has put Oklahoma on three years of probation and issued a $15,000 fine for major violations in its men’s basketball program.
The Division I infractions committee also vacated all 13 wins from Oklahoma’s 2009-10 season, took away a scholarship and limited recruiting efforts.
Most of the penalties had been proposed by the school, which said former assistant Oronde Taliaferro broke NCAA rules by failing to report that a player had received an impermissible extra benefit and by lying to investigators.
The violations occurred while the Sooners were still on probation for major rules violations involving recruiting phone calls by former coach Kelvin Sampson and football players being paid for work they weren’t doing at a Norman car dealership.
Under NCAA bylaws, a “repeat violator” can face a minimum of having the sport dropped for one or two seasons.
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Photo of Blake Griffin as a Sooner.
23, Blake Griffin, Oklahoma Sooners, NBA Clippers
