The Big 12 went 7-3 against the S.E.C. on Saturday in the last every Big 12/S.E.C. challenge in basketball. However, it was Oklahoma’s win over Alabama that rung the loudest among the two conferences. The Sooners thumped the second-ranked Crimson Tide by a final score of 93-69, prompting Bama head coach Nate Oats to worry about the perception of the Southeastern Conference.
“It doesn’t have any effect on SEC standings, which is the only good thing to come out of this,” Oats said. “Hopefully, we will recover from a loss out of conference, but, you know, it’s not good. We needed the SEC to do well in this Big 12 challenge. We obviously didn’t do our job on it.”
The Tide had won it’s previous nine consecutive games before the trip to Norman, while the the Sooners were sitting on a three-game losing streak. If anything historical were to happen at the Lloyd Noble Center it wasn’t likely to be in Oklahoma’s favor. However, history did happen on Saturday and it was very much in favor of Porter Moser’s squad as Grant Sherfield (30) and Jalen Hill (26) combined for 56 points in front of the most raucous home crowd OU the second year coach had seen in Norman.
“I thought the crowd was unbelievable,” Moser said after the game. “I sat there when the crowd rushed the floor — you know, my younger self might have ran out in the middle of it — and I just sat there and just said, ‘This is a vision.’ And like, this kind of excitement with the student body — I thought they were awesome. They were there early. Best crowd I’ve had since I’ve been here.”
It was the largest scoring output for the Sooners this season, and it was the program’s first win over a team ranked in the AP’s top two since the 2002 Big 12 Tournament when they took out #1 Kansas in the championship game. However, the crown jewel of Oklahoma’s monumental upset on Saturday is that it’s the program’s largest margin of victory ever against an AP top-five team and the largest margin of defeat ever for a No.2 ranked team playing against an unranked opponent.
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