West Virginia crushes stagnant Sooners
Peyton Little would give her two front teeth to win a Big 12 title.
The redshirt senior guard wanted a chance to cut down the nets at the Chesapeake Energy Arena so badly that she’d wrench the centerpiece of her smile right out of her mouth.
If she didn’t need her arms or her legs to get her there, she’d give up those, too.
And yet, as coach Sherri Coale predicted the week before Oklahoma took on West Virginia in the last quarterfinal of the Big 12 Women’s Basketball Tournament, that overwhelming desire of Little and the other five seniors to win contributed to the Sooners’ stunning 82-58 loss to No. 6 seed West Virginia.
“Therein lies the problem,” Coale said on Thursday. “They want it so bad, and I want for them to enjoy the pursuit of it more than they want the victory of it. If they can get that in the right order, really cool stuff can happen. But you can’t fault them for their investment and their desire to have it happen.”
From the moment the No. 3 seed Sooners (229, 13-5 Big 12) stepped on the court Saturday night, Coale recognized that her team wouldn’t get to Monday night’s finale. Heck, they wouldn’t even make it to Sunday afternoon for the semifinals.
“I’ve been coaching a long time,” Coale said afterward, “and I don’t think that I’ve ever had a team take the floor and appear to be as ill-prepared or as unmotivated as we appeared tonight, and it’s hard to understand and I’m disappointed by it.
“I want to publicly apologize to our fans and our administration because that was not what the University of Oklahoma deserves. It is not the way our institution should be represented.”
Oklahoma didn’t come of the gate calm, instead playing with five pressure cookers wearing white and crimson jerseys on the floor at any given time. Coale knew her team was in trouble from the first defensive possession.
“We did not adhere to the scout and knew it was a problem right then,” she said. “We were guarding in a panicked sort of way, nobody doing their job on weak side and that eroded trust and it went down the slippery slope really fast.”
As West Virginia (2110, 8-10) raced to a 26-10 lead in the first quarter, the Sooners began to come undone at the seams, rushing shots and doing anything to stop the Mountaineers’ offensive onslaught. In the moment the team needed a leader the most, no one stepped up to pull the team together.
“It was 12-0, and we didn’t have any leadership,” Vionise PierreLouis said. “Nobody stepped up and said, ‘Give me the ball’ or anything like that. It looked like we were scared out there.”
Coale used a slew of different lineups, working nearly all the way down her bench to find some kind of workable combination.
But OU’s attempts were futile. The Sooners made just 7-of-28 field goals in the first half.
It didn’t get any better in the third quarter when OU made 1-of-10 attempts. By the end of the evening, the Sooners managed to make just 18 field goals, shooting 33.3 percent while WVU hit one more than that in the first half alone.
West Virginia simply couldn’t miss.
The Mountaineers knocked in 19-of-33 field goals in the first half — including a 6-of-11 mark from beyond the arc.
WVU continued that trend in the third quarter, building a 37-point lead at one point.
Led by unanimous AllBig 12 selection Tynice Martin’s 21 points, four Mountaineers finished with double-digit scoring.
Only Pierre-Louis and redshirt senior guard Maddie Manning managed to hit double figures for the Sooners, notching 10 and 14 points, respectively.
OU will wait to find out its postseason destination on Selection Monday on March 13.
“We didn’t win 22 games this year by accident,” Coale said. “So we’ll take this time in the next two weeks and find a way … We will figure it out. That’s what we’re paid to do.”
West Virginia 82, No. 19 Oklahoma 58