Much of loss tied to poor coaching
By DAVE SITTLER World Sports Writer
2/6/2006
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LAWRENCE, KAN. -- In the end, Kelvin Sampson stood quietly alone for several seconds on the Allen Fieldhouse floor with his arms folded. How appropriate.
Sampson had just watched his team pull what could go down as one of the biggest fold jobs in Oklahoma basketball history. In the short term, blowing a 15-point lead to Kansas in the final six minutes of Sunday's game could have a devastating effect on the Sooners the rest of this season.
These opportunities are rare. OU is now 67-16 on KU's home court. And since the Big 12 Conference was formed in 1996, South Division teams are 0-29 against the Jayhawks in their legendary arena.
The Jayhawks and history were there for OU to grab. Instead, the Sooners lost their poise and probably lost any chance of defending the Big 12 title they shared with KU last season.
A huge portion of the blame for the 59-58 loss belongs directly on Sampson. The OU coach, who is now 0-7 at Allen Fieldhouse, couldn't find a way to stop the bleeding when his panicked players looked to him for leadership and help.
The game's final play was also the final example of how KU's Bill Self outcoached Sampson in the game's final, frantic minutes.
OU had the ball under its basket with one
second on the clock. Self correctly guessed that Sampson would attempt to force the ball inside to forward Taj Gray, so the KU coach inserted his four tallest players into the lineup.
When those four surrounded Gray, the Sooners didn't have any other option but to throw to guard Michael Neal for a desperation 3-pointer that didn't even come close.
A few minutes earlier, when KU had sliced OU's 53-38 lead to 53-51, Sampson called a timeout. The two-minute break was to allow the players to calm down, while Sampson diagramed a high-percentage play that many coaches use to stem the other team's rally.
And how did OU execute the play? The Sooners looked so confused that they failed to even get a shot off before the 35-second clock had expired, creating a turnover that KU promptly turned into a game-tying basket.
Yes, OU's players also contributed to this shocking collapse. They allowed the boisterous crowed to affect them in the late stages when the Sooner guards committed critical turnovers.
Particularly disheartening was the play of OU's three seniors. Gray, Kevin Bookout and Terrell Everett had fueled OU's early run that gave the Sooners their first chance to win at KU since 1993, but they couldn't respond with critical baskets in the stretch.
Instead, it was the young Jayhawks who played like veterans. KU's top seven players, who are either freshmen or sophomores, kept their poise while the older Sooners came unraveled.
"We should have brought it in (to a timeout) and said, 'Hey, let's just calm down and let's go from here,' " Bookout said. "We still had a 10-point lead, but we didn't stay together."
Instead, the Sooners fell apart in what now is becoming a trend. The Sooners, who slipped to 14-5 overall and 5-3 in the Big 12, also blew leads in their other two conference losses.
In those narrow defeats to Nebraska and Missouri, Sampson had the understandable excuse that the Sooners were missing Neal. And that looked like a valid argument when OU ripped off five straight wins when Neal regained his health.
But Neal was healthy Sunday, as were the rest of the Sooners. So injuries can no longer be a crutch for this team as it attempts to regroup in time to put together a record that will impress the NCAA Tournament Committee when it hands out seeds on Selection Sunday.
It will be interesting to see how healthy the Sooners are mentally for Wednesday night's game at Oklahoma State. Normally, a Bedlam Series game doesn't need any extra motivation to get the teams excited. But this wasn't any normal loss.
"We were 0-2 in the conference and we won five straight, so that shows a lot about our team right there," Bookout said. "We're going to bounce back, and we'll be just fine.
"It won't be easy at Gallagher (Iba Arena). We can beat them (Cowboys), but we've got to play hard. We can beat anyone in the conference if we play hard."
After defeating Texas 10 days ago and having KU down for 34 minutes, the Sooners certainly looked capable of playing with anyone in the Big 12 and most teams in the country.
"This one is hard to handle because I thought we outplayed them for a long time," Sampson said. "And they outplayed the last six minutes."
Yup, you do have to play the entire 40 minutes. But the same goes for coaching.
In the end, OU didn't get a 40-minute effort in either area.
Dave Sittler 581-8312
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Could Sittler contridict himself more in this article? He says Sampson designed the right play, and the players couldn't execute it. That's Sampson's fault how, exactly?
Plus he's just wrong when he says the final play was blown. The fact that the inbounder recognized that Gray was covered and instead went to Neal shows that.
Look, there's plenty of blame to go around here. Coaches and players can all swallow some for the loss, which is all the more bitter due to its dissapointing nature. But Sampson has gotten a lot more right that he has wrong while he's been here, and still gets little to no slack from a vocal minority. I, for one, am still willing to cut him a heck of a lot more.