OSU hoops team has issues. Here's one diagnosis.
Published: 12/23/2011 9:59 AM
Last Modified: 12/23/2011 10:39 AM
Here’s what Oklahoma State basketball coach Travis Ford is selling: After a 17-point loss to Alabama in Birmingham dropped the Cowboys to 6-5, he said what you are seeing is “a product of the schedule.”
Are you buying it?
To a degree, I am.
An OSU fan sent me a tweet and asked what I thought was wrong with the Cowboy hoops team. The best answer I could give was that this appears to be an average squad that overscheduled.
OSU’s five losses are to teams with a collective record of 50-11. (The breakdown: Pittsburgh is 11-1. New Mexico and Stanford are 10-2. Alabama is 9-3. Virginia Tech is 10-3.)
A program like OSU is expected to win its share of games against good teams. But Keiton Page and Reger Dowell are the only players on the roster who entered this season with more than one year of Division I experience.
Coaches usually try to schedule proportionally to the talent and experience of their players. When you have a loaded team, you play anyone, any time, anywhere. When you want to make a young team feel confident, you pack the nonconference schedule with home games against designated victims.
This would have been a perfect season for OSU to play a cushy schedule. Load it up with opponents who have hyphens (the Cowboys were smart enough to open the season with consecutive games against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and Arkansas-Pine Bluff) in their university names. Or directional schools. Or schools that sound like a cowboy hat (Stetson) or perhaps an alias for a country and western singer (Huston-Tillotson). Put in a call to Mel Tillis State in the offseason and ask if the basketball team is interested in visiting Gallagher-Iba Arena.
To Ford’s credit, he didn’t do that. Not only is OSU playing quality opposition. The Cowboys are in the midst of playing five consecutive games away from home. A 26-day stretch between home games is the second-longest in-season odyssey for OSU since the 1988-89 campaign.
OSU ends the nonconference portion of the schedule with a Dec. 28 game against SMU at American Airlines Center in Dallas and a Dec. 31 home game against Virginia Tech. Both are must-win games if the Cowboys want to salvage confidence before embarking on the Big 12’s 18-game round-robin schedule.
Ford hoped the difficult schedule would prepare his team for league play. He got unlucky from a matchup standpoint because his team has offensive liabilities and wound up facing nonconference teams who excel at getting stops. Stanford, Alabama, New Mexico and Missouri State rank in the top 19 nationally in scoring defense or field goal percentage defense. The next opponent, SMU, ranks 37th in scoring defense. The Cowboys have been limited to point totals in the 50s four times already.
If OSU had scheduled a bunch of punching bags, the Cowboys would be scoring more points and winning more games. Players would be smiling and fans would be happy (even if critical of the schedule) and wondering what sort of finish was possible in league play.
Instead, OSU is fortunate to be 6-5. The Cowboys, who rallied from second-half deficits of seven or more points to beat Texas-San Antonio, Tulsa and Missouri State, easily could be 3-8.
“I know everybody is wanting instant gratification....,” Ford said before the Alabama game.
“We wanted to win all these games, but I fully grasped what we were going against. All these teams are better than us. Eventually they won’t be. You go through periods like this and eventually they won’t be. It doesn’t mean we don’t expect to win them. We have upset enough people and I have been a part of overachieving teams before.”
Unless the Cowboys overachieve or improve, they’ll make up all that time away from home by staying home in March.
--Jimmie Tramel.
Written by
Jimmie Tramel
Sports Writer
