Since Early Season Meeting OU, OSU Astonishingly Headed in Opposite Directions

Remember the 30 for 30 intros? What if I told you …

Well Oklahoma State and Oklahoma played out one of their own this year in college basketball. What if I told you following the 20-point blowout of the Pokes in Norman on January 3 that only one of those teams would make the NCAA Tournament? You would have believed that, right?

You just wouldn’t have believed which one.

Who knows what’s going to happen on Sunday when the committee unveils its 2018 bracket, but there’s a chance that Oklahoma State, not Oklahoma, could be the team dancing come the beginning of next week. I thought about what the reaction would have been had I tweeted that fact out on January 4.

I think it would have looked something like this …

It’s hard to overstate how much better OU looked at the time. Twenty points was the final margin, but it was definitely not the whole story. OSU didn’t look like it deserved to be in the same league as the Sooners.

And yet … here we are. If OSU beats Kansas on Thursday, they’re definitely in. OU? They’ve lost 8 of 10 and are teetering on the verge of being out of the NCAA Tournament.

“I didn’t expect to be in this position by my means,” said Young on Wednesday. “It’s a lot different. I didn’t expect us to be in that position. I obviously expected us to keep winning and hopefully have a chance to get a 1 seed or 2 seed or up in that range. But our body of work speaks for itself and I think we have a good shot of getting in just because of our resume and all of that. We’ll have to see. Hopefully we’ll get in.”

“It’s very disappointing,” added his coach, Lon Kruger. “Obviously a very good stretch early, nonconference, early conference and then in February we just didn’t play well at all. Actually played better the last couple weeks, better defensively, still not the way we need to play as well as we need to play, but, yeah, it’s disappointing for sure.”

OU went 6-11 in Big 12 games following that smackdown against OSU at the beginning of January. I remember at the time talking with people about OU being a potential Final Four team. I just didn’t know we were talking about the NIT.

On the flip side, Oklahoma State has gone 9-8 in the Big 12 since that game and has suddenly won three in a row and four of their last five in this conference. It’s a testament to many things, not the least of which is Mike Boynton’s never-say-die attitude that has clearly permeated his locker room and his team.

You can argue that OSU is where it is at because of spectacular coaching and the culture Boynton created. I don’t know that that’s 100 percent ack-rut, but there’s certainly a lot of truth to it.

One of my biggest takeaways tonight: The #LetsWork hashtag is fun and become Boynton’s thing — But you saw it on the court tonight. One of the biggest things missing the past 10 years was #okstate’s basketball identity: Toughness, defense and hustle. That won them the game.

— Carson Cunningham (@KOCOCarson) March 8, 2018

“I think it’s a credit to the 14 guys that we have in the locker room,” said senior Kendall Smith on Wednesday about not mailing in this season when they could have earlier in the year. “We’ve got guys that every day we’re pulling for each other and we push each other.

“We got a phenomenal coaching staff that believes in us, so when you got good people surrounding you, no matter the ups and downs that you go through, as long as you stay true to our values we will be fine and we knew that.”

Remember the Baylor-Oklahoma State football game in 2011? Remember what Brandon Weeden did to Baylor’s defense and what Justin Gilbert did to Robert Griffin 3? Remember thinking to yourself what if after that game somebody had told me one of these guys would win the Heisman, and it wouldn’t be Weeden?

That’s how I feel about this OU-OSU resume swap. It’s astonishing to me that OU and Trae Young have fallen off a cliff and OSU, against all odds, has hung on and clung to what could (and definitely should) turn into a NCAA Tournament bid on Sunday.