Tilting at Windmills

While basking in the Big 8′s success in another postseason, here’s your one-stop shopping, blogowebs roundup for the beginning of your Sweet 16 week:

This morning’s genius from Red Dirt King’s Dirt Monkey says OU still has yet to play their best basketball. That’s a scary thought … if you’re Syracuse

The Barking Carnival guys really don’t want to bitch about the officiating in their loss to Duke on Saturday, yet there sure is a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Our Rock Chalk friends at Oread Boom Kings seem to think they’re landing Lance Stephenson, the all-time leading scorer in New York prep hoops history. The kid’s been on recruiting radars since junior high. Apparently he has really big feet, too.

Football junkie and recruitnik Dedfischer over at the Tortilla Retort likes what he sees with Tech DE signee Aundrey Barr.

Mizzou fan Phenomenal Smith over at Atomic Teeth relays Ken Pomeroy’s projection that OU has a 48% chance of beating Syracuse. Pomeroy’s brackets are getting hammered, so take it fwiw.

Ogle Madness continues over at The Lost Ogle. #1 seed Gary England will drop some flat earth knowledge on appropriately-seeded, #9 Channel 9 sixth-man Toby Rowland while #4 seed Carrie Underwood puts her pipes up against the inmate running the asylum, #5 seed Mark Rodgers.

We began talking about OU’s history as a 1 or a 2 seed in the NCAA tournament yesterday, in advance of the 2-seed Sooners’ game with Morgan State tomorrow.

Today we’ll finish the lookback with the 80s Sooners featuring Mookie Blaylock, Sky King and the great Wayman Tisdale.

1989 – 1 seed

The core of OU’s 1988 national runner-up team returned with All-Americans Mookie Blaylock (20 ppg, 6.7 assists, 3.7 steals) and Stacey King (26 ppg, 10 rebounds) leading the way. That year, Blaylock became the first player in NCAA history to notch more than 200 assists and 100 steals in back to back seasons. He also set an NCAA record for most steals in a game (13). Blaylock and King didn’t have Harvey Grant and Ricky Grace anymore, but the Sooners didn’t miss a beat, plugging in people like Tyrone Jones, Terrence Mullins and Skeeter Henry.

This Sooner team averaged 102 ppg, scoring over 130 ppg in three straight games in December and averaged 126 per in two games at the All-College Tournament. The Sooners won a second-straight Big 8 title, but lost the Big 8 tournament championship game to Missouri in Kansas City, which might have cost them placement in the tournament. The selection committee thought they’d be cute and let #16 seed East Tennessee State play in their home state against the #1 seed Sooners in Nashville. The powers that be almost got their wish of seeing a huge upset as OU survived a 72-71 scare from the Buccaneers. Tubbs took it out on La Tech two days later, sending the Bulldogs and future Dallas Mavericks stiff Randy White back home to Ruston with a 124-81 spanking. The 30-win Sooners ran out of gas in the Sweet 16, though, and ran into a future Denver Nugget Bryant Stith, the all-time leading scorer at Virginia. The Cavaliers ended the Sooners’ season with an 86-80 upset in Lexington, KY.

1988 – 1 seed

This was the closest OU has ever come to a national championship in men’s basketball. The ’88 Sooners averaged nearly 103 ppg and all five starters – Stacey “Sky” King (22.3), Harvey Grant (20.9), Mookie Blaylock ( 16.4), point guard Ricky Grace (14.7) and the sharp-shooting Dave Sieger (10.9) – averaged in double figures. Daron Oshay “Mookie” Blaylock was so good and such a popular player both in college and the NBA that “Mookie Blaylock” was actually the name of Pearl Jam before they were Pearl Jam, then the group named their first album after his jersey number (10). Blaylock is arguably considered to be the best guard to ever put on a Sooner uniform. Mookie led the nation in steals that season and set NCAA records for highest per-game steals average (3.8) and most number of steals in a season (150). King went on to grab some NBA hardware during the Michael Jordan Bulls-era’s first threepeat … with Harvey’s brother Horace. Grace is still the standard-bearer for point scorers at OU and Sieger was a more reliable and less hair-gelled Cade Davis. Tubbs had all of the pieces befitting a national championship team that year.

The Sooners won the Big 8 regular season and tournament titles and with their subsequent #1 seed in the NCAA tournament, made quick work of Tennessee-Chattanooga, Auburn, Louisville and Villanova to cruise into the Final Four in Kansas City, beating those four teams by an average of almost 20 points. If there was any doubt about this team, and there shouldn’t have been, it was allayed in the national semifinal when the Sooners took out an NBA-laden Arizona squad, featuring Steve Kerr, Sean Elliot, Tom Tolbert and Jud Buechler, by 18 points. The only thing standing in the Sooners’ way of a national title was to beat a team they’d already beaten twice that year, 26-11 Kansas. There were problems, though: the game was in Kansas City and the Jayhawks were hot.

In one of the best halves of basketball in NCAA championship game history, the two teams traded punches for the first 20 minutes and went to the lockerroom tied at 50 apiece. King and Grant combined for 23 points in the opening half, Sieger drained six threes and the Blaylock-led Sooners defense forced 15 turnovers. The Sooners struggled to score in the second half, though, uncharacteristically getting only 29 points (they usually scored that many the second they stepped off the bus at in ’88) as the King-Grant duo were limited to just 8. OU was within one at 78-77 with less than a minute and the Hawks missed the second shot of a 1-and-1, but the Ed Hightower-led officiating crew called Sieger for pushing Danny Manning in the back, sending him to the line to effectively seal the game.

OU finished the year 35-4, which is to date still the highest single-season win total for any Sooner basketball team.

1985 – 1 seed

Wayman Tisdale’s last hurrah ended too soon. The 6’9” forward with the seven-foot smile was and is everything to the Oklahoma basketball program. You could say that without Tubbs snatching him out of Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington High School, we wouldn’t have seen the kind of success in the later 80s that we did. With apologies to Gar Heard and Alvan Adams, Tisdale put OU hoops on the map. Some of his accolades included being the first true freshman in NCAA history to be named first team AP All-American (’83), finishing with what is still an OU record 25.6 ppg career average, owning the top 2 best scoring seasons in school history, being selected third in the NBA draft (the highest for a Sooner to date, but stay tuned with Blake) and joining a select list of collegiate players with over 2,000 points and 1,000 rebounds. Tisdale set that last mark in just 104 games. Nobody in the last 25 years has accomplished that feat faster and the people who hit that 2,000-1,000 mark in fewer games than Tisdale have names like Elgin Baylor, Lew Alcindor, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, Jerry West and Elvin Hayes.

The Sooners won the Big 8 title that year, going 13-1 in conference, riding Tisdale’s dominance and a great supporting cast of Darryl “Choo” Kennedy (15.7 ppg, 8 rebounds per game), Anthony Bowie (13.4 ppg) and Tim McCalister (13.1 ppg). McCalister, never shy about jacking one up if he was open anywhere inside 30 feet, probably would have averaged more had he played in a different era. The 3-point line didn’t come to the college game until his senior year when he hit 87 in ’87 and averaged nearly 20 ppg, the highest of his career.

After winning the Big 8 tournament and having little trouble with North Carolina A&T and Illinois State, the Sooners got a gift in being sent to Dallas to play in the Regional. When they took off the bow and opened the box, the surprise was The Mailman, Karl Malone, and Louisiana Tech waiting in the Sweet 16. In one of the epic Sooner tournament games in history, Tisdale and the Mailman slugged it out into overtime. Tisdale hit a shot over Malone with :06 to play in the extra period to send OU into the Elite 8 against Keith Lee and Memphis State. Lee proved to be worth every penny that Memphis coach Dana Kirk paid him, pushing the Tigers to a two-point win over the Sooners and into the Final Four, which would later be vacated by the NCAA due to Lee’s fat checkbook.

The Sooners’ 31 wins that year marked the first time that an OU club had eclipsed the 30-win mark.

1984 – 2 seed

The Sooners entered the 1984 tournament with their highest seed ever, led by Wayman Tisdale’s eye-popping 27 ppg. The super-sophomore All-American was surrounded by a cast of role players in David “Truck” Johnson, Jan Pannell, Calvin Pierce and outstanding freshmen like Tim McCalister and Darryl “Choo” Kennedy. This was definitely Tisdale’s team, though. On December 28, 1983, Tisdale dropped 61 points and 22 rebounds on Texas-San Antonio in the All-College tournament. That broke a 27-year-old conference, single-game scoring record that had been set by Wilt Chamberlain in 1956 and is still just one of three 40-20 games in school history (Griffin notched the third one against Tech earlier this year).

Oklahoma went into the NCAA tournament with a Big 8 title and gaudy 29-4 record. In the days when the field was 48 teams and byes were awarded, OU was looming for the Dayton Flyers, who had just knocked off LSU in the first round. In a stunning upset, Roosevelt Chapman scored nearly half of the Flyers’ points to knock off the 2-seed Sooners and Tisdale, 89-85.

Going back to when OU went from a basketball afterthought to a player on the national stage (1982, shout-out Billy Tubbs) through the 2009 season, OU has now been at least 2 seed in the NCAA tournament a total of eight times. Tubbs had four #1 seeds and a #2 seed while Kelvin Sampson had a single #1 and #2 each.

Look at this year’s Sooners squad led by Blake Griffin and Willie Warren and you can see some similarities with past OU tournament squads fronted by guys like Hollis Price and Ace McGhee, Skeeter Henry and Jackie Jones, Mookie Blaylock and Stacey King, and Tim McCalister and the great Wayman Tisdale. All of those teams, including the 2009 version, had strong, All-American caliber, inside-outside presences and posed matchup problems at both guard and forward. None of those teams were without fault and their weaknesses eventually caught up to them, although man … that 1990 team.

In this first of a two-part series, we’ll take a look at the last three times OU was either a #1 or a #2 seed. Tomorrow’s edition will have the juicy and bittersweet Tisdale tournament years, plus the bad aftertaste of Danny and the freaking 11-loss Miracles.

2003 – 1 seed

Coming off of a Final Four year, Sampson replaced Ace McGhee with Kevin Bookout, riding the Oklahoma prep star and senior All-American Hollis Price to a 24-6 record and a third straight Big 12 tournament championship coming into the NCAA tournament. After cruising through South Carolina State and Cal in the first two rounds played in OKC, OU was sent back east to Albany, NY where the Sooners knew if they got past 12th-seeded Cinderella Butler in the Sweet 16, Carmelo Anthony’s Syracuse squad would probably be waiting in the Elite 8. That’s exactly what happened and despite getting the Cuse to play grind-it-out, low-scoring Kelvin ball, the Orangemen (who would go on to win the national championship) hung a 16-point loss on the Sooners, denying Sampson his second straight Final Four.

It was your world, Hollis.

2002 – 2 seed

In the greatest tournament run of the Kelvin Sampson era, the Sooners fell one game short of playing for the national title. The Sooners, behind All-Americans Ace McGhee and Hollis Price, took a 27-4 record and a second straight Big 12 tournament championship into the Big Dance. OU didn’t even blink as they went right through Illinois-Chicago and Xavier in the Dallas sub-regional. Playing in the West Regional in San Jose, the Sooners pimp-slapped Luke Walton and Arizona, then laid the wood in a 16-point win over Missouri in the Elite 8. The run would end in Atlanta, though, as the Sooners, playing in just their fourth Final Four in school history, couldn’t handle Indiana’s shooters and ball movement, dropping a heart-breaking 73-64 decision. The Sooners finished the season 31-5, the second-best record in school history and just the fourth time an Oklahoma team posted 30 wins or more in a season.

True story that I didn’t really get at the time: I was in San Jose for those two games and as OU was cutting down the nets after the Mizzou game, I called Hollis’ dad, then shouted over the crowd at Hollis to come get the phone. Kelvin was closer to me and gave me a strange look. I pointed to Hollis and yelled to Kelvin that I had Hollis Sr. on the phone. In hindsight, maybe Kelvin wasn’t confused at all. Rather, he might have just wanted to borrow my phone to, you know, outwork some other coaches.

Final Four, baby.

1990 – 1 seed

This team was arguably better than the 88 team Billy Tubbs took to the NCAA Finals, and the Sooners were out to prove something with their third straight 1 seed. OU won the Big 8 tournament that year and posted a 26-4 record prior to the Big Dance. Tubbs’ squad was loaded with talent in 1990 and should have been the one to bring OU it’s first ever basketball national championship. OU had six players averaging in double figures, led by senior Skeeter Henry’s 17.3 ppg and William Davis’ 16.6 ppg. Tubbs had a deep lineup and could throw any number of athletes at teams, such as 6’8”, one-year wonder Jackie Jones, point guard Smokey McCovery and former McDonald’s All-American Damon Patterson, while bringing future stars like Kermit Holmes and Jeff Webster (who would finish his career as the third-leading scorer in school history) off the bench. OU won its third straight Big 8 title and was riding a seven-game winning streak heading into the NCAA Tournament, all of the wins by double digits. Thanks to finishing the season #1 in the country, the Sooners got the top seed in the tournament and were sent just 5.5 hours south of Norman to play its opening rounds at the Erwin Center in Austin. After making short work of Towson State in the 1-16 game, it looked like OU would get a chance to cement itself as a national power by taking out North Carolina in the second round. However, Tarheel Rick Fox hit a now-infamous last-second shot off the glass to upset the Sooners, 79-77, and slam the door on what many feel was the great OU basketball team of all time.

Feel free to share your memories here and look for Part 2 tomorrow.