The Sooners are the No. 2 seed in the West Region in this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the highest placement in the brackets for a Lon Kruger-coached Oklahoma team in his fifth season as the Sooners head coach.
The last time an Oklahoma men’s team was seeded as high as No. 2 was in 2009, ironically the same year that Sooner star Blake Griffin was named National Player of the Year, winning both the Wooden Award and the Naismith Award as college basketball’s best player. Fast forward to 2016, and Buddy Hield is in position to duplicate what Griffin accomplished and with a team that also sits in the two spot in the NCAA Tournament.