The Oklahoma Sooners are the fifth and final team from the Big 12 in the NCAA Tournament. They finished fifth in the conference, with an 11-7 conference record, and lost to Iowa State in the Big 12 tournament. Here’s five things you need to know about the 10-seeded Sooners:
- They go nine deep. The Sooners don’t have a real superstar, but they have a lot of pretty good players. Nobody plays more than 30 minutes per game, and nine guys get at least fifteen minutes.
Their top two players are seniors. Forward Romero Osby is the top scorer and rebounder, with 15.8 ppg and 7.0 rpg, and guard Steven Pledger is the second-leading scorer with 11.8 ppg. Pledger and Osby are also the two leaders in minutes per game, by a fairly substantial margin.- They hit their free throws. As a team, Oklahoma shoots 76% from the stripe, and only two of their nine top players shoot worse than 70% (one is 69.6%), and nobody does worse than 65% among those top nine. Earlier this season, the Sooners tied the NCAA record for most free throws in a game without a miss, making all 34 of their attempts in a win over Iowa State.
- They’re not really big on assists. The team leader in assists per game is Sam Grooms, with 3.2 apg and a 2.7 assist-to-turnover ratio, and he only plays about 20 minutes per game. They rank 191st in the country in assists per game.
- The Sooners are coached by Lon Kruger, who has engineered quite the turnaround from last season’s squad, which went 15-16 overall and 5-13 in conference play. Kruger took the Oklahoma job after taking UNLV to the Tournament in four of his last five seasons at the helm. Kruger has been to the Final Four before, but it was all the way back in 1994 with Florida. This Oklahoma team is his first major conference team to make the tournament since 2000, when he was the head coach at Illinois.