Oklahoma Falls to Oklahoma State in Bedlam

STILLWATER — Oklahoma’s January woes have officially spilled over into February.

The Sooners couldn’t hold on to the basketball in the second half, opening the door for the Oklahoma State Cowboys to take the Bedlam basketball victory 64-55 on Saturday afternoon at Gallagher-Iba Arena.

Losers again, OU has now dropped seven of its last eight, and falls to 13-10 (3-7 in Big 12 play) on the year. The victory pushed Oklahoma State to 11-11 (4-6) this season.

After the Sooners only turned the ball over six times in the opening half, the Cowboy defense came alive.

“I thought we came out and really had some pop offensively,” OU head coach Porter Moser said after the game in a Zoom press conference. “I thought we had in our mind what we wanted to do and I thought we did that. In the second half, we kind of went down that rabbit hole of trying to do high-degree difficulties.

“When they're sagging off two or three guys, the lane is packed and we've got to free it out and kick it and knock a couple of shots down. They're all out on (Umoja Gibson), but then a couple of our guys have got to knock down some shots or teams are just going to be packing it in.”

Oklahoma coughed the ball up 11 times in the second half alone, allowing OSU to lead the final 15 minutes of the contest.

Oklahoma got nice contributions from Elijah Harkless and Tanner Groves offensively, but the duo wasn’t enough to power the Sooners to victory.

Groves led all scorers with 23 points on 10-of-17 shooting, and Harkless finished his deputy, adding 15 points for the Sooners.

The Sooners didn’t get much help from anyone else, however.

Outside of Groves and Harkless, the rest of Oklahoma’s team combined to shoot 7-of-32 from the floor, a meager 21.8 percent from the field.

“Their defense is very good,” Moser said. “They're long, athletic, they've got a rim protector… To beat good defenses you need multiple guys to have good nights.”

On top of the turnover problems, the Sooners had no answers on how to defend the Cowboy big men.

Moussa Cisse and Kalib Boone feasted in the paint, combining to score 23 points on Saturday afternoon.

“I thought sometimes it gets you out of rhythm,” Moser said of Boone’s second half post-ups on Groves. “A lot of people don't do just strict post ups as much. I thought Tanner did a good job on a lot of them.

“… It was more of our offense. We just struggled offensively at times. I thought we rebounded well enough to win, I thought we played hard enough to win. Post D, they got us but I thought we got them back on a bunch of them. That wasn’t it. It was, we had a bunch of bad possessions, either turnovers, missed shots, trying to do too much.”

Chants of “S-E-C” and “U-S-C” reigned down on the Sooners as the student section held up the back page of the student newspaper, which had former OU football coach Lincoln Riley emblazoned across the back.

With the wounds of Oklahoma’s impending move to the SEC still clearly fresh in Stillwater, the Sooners were unable to overcome the atmosphere to silence the hostile crowd.

The road ahead doesn’t get any easier, as Oklahoma’s three-game conference stretch against West Virginia, TCU and Oklahoma State was supposed to be where the schedule relented a bit. Instead, the Sooners went 1-2 over the stretch, and now face contests against Texas Tech, Kansas, Texas and Iowa State.

Up first, OU will return home to host the Red Raiders. Tip-off between Oklahoma and Texas Tech is scheduled for 8 p.m. Wednesday, and the contest inside the Lloyd Noble Center will be broadcast on ESPN.

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