It’s been an exciting first month of hoops in the Big 12, with a few preconceived notions about teams evolving over the first four weeks. Kansas still appears to be alone at the head of the pack, but the gap between the Jayhawks and the rest of the league looks smaller than originally considered with Baylor storming out of the gate unbeaten and West Virginia showing no ill effects from their departed seniors. We’ve also seen a handful of Big 12 players take sizable steps in the progression of their careers. Some of the five breakout players listed below have simply produced at similar clips to their careers to this point, but with bigger workloads this season, while others have just become more well-rounded players. Still others have benefited from changes in their team’s style of play or coaching, and some improvements have been a result of some combination of the above.

Regardless of the reason, the thing to watch moving forward will be whether these players can carry their newfound success through league play. These are the Big 12’s five most improved players in order of who has the best chance to sustain his performance the rest of the way.

Jawun Evans, Oklahoma State

Look for Oklahoma State’s Jawun Evans to leave a few more opponents in his dust before the end of the 2016-17 season. (AP/Rick Bowmer)

• 2016-17: 33.9% POSS, 23.9 PPG, 5.1 APG, 9.9% TO
• 2015-16: 26.6% POSS, 12.9 PPG, 4.9 APG, 20.4% TO

The sophomore Evans was already a tremendous point guard, but Oklahoma State’s coaching transition from Travis Ford to Brad Underwood has unlocked something special in Stillwater. His huge increase in scoring has been heavily influenced by the breakneck pace with which the Cowboys are playing (~10 more possessions per game), but it also says a lot about Evans that he can maintain such a high rate of productivity while taking on more responsibility in a hectic environment.

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Oklahoma didn’t make it to the championship game against Xavier at the Tire Pros Invitational but nearly everything else over the weekend in Orlando fell the Sooners’ way. An 89-70 win over Tulane was followed up by a blown lead against Northern Iowa (which knows a little something about blown leads) to lose 73-67 in overtime. The Sooners bounced back with a 70-64 victory against Clemson in the third place game on Sunday to notch a nice resume-enhancing win. Here are three takeaways from Oklahoma’s third place finish at the Tire Pros Invitational last weekend.

Jordan Woodard is clearly ‘the guy’ in Norman this year. (Sooner Sports)

1. Oklahoma’s bench is still a work in progress. This was to be expected considering that Lon Kruger’s bench rotation consists of two freshmen, Matt Freeman and Kameron McGusty; a transfer, Darrion Strong; and a sophomore (Jamuni McNeace) who averaged fewer than eight minutes per game last season. In the Tulane game, no bench player scored more than six points, although McNeace was able to pull down nine rebounds. In the Northern Iowa game, no bench player scored more than three points. Against Clemson, McGusty found a rhythm, going 6-of-8 from the field and scoring 14 points. Still, Kruger is giving 37 percent of his minutes to the bench without a corresponding level of production. He needs more. Read the rest of this entry »

Feast Week is almost here. To get you ready for the Big 12’s representation in the various holiday tournaments over the next couple weeks, our Feast Week Mission Briefings begin today with Oklahoma in the Tire Pros Invitational.

Catching Up: Oklahoma upperclassmen Jordan Woodard and Khadeem Lattin were projected to have much bigger roles this season, and it’s already clear after just one game (a season-opening 97-61 win over Northwestern State) that they will. Lattin on Sunday notched his third career double-double with 19 points and 11 rebounds, while Woodard poured in 16 points and collected five rebounds. Oklahoma’s big lead also allowed young players such as freshman Matt Freeman, who came off the bench to score 15 points, to get involved. The fact that Lon Kruger’s team easily managed a 97-61 victory is a good sign, but a win over an 0-2 team that ranks among the bottom 60 teams nationally in the KenPom rankings won’t be found on the front page of Oklahoma’s final NCAA Tournament resume.

Lon Kruger, one of the Big 12’s best on the sidelines, will once again have Oklahoma right in the thick of things. (CBS Sports)

Opening Round Preview: Tulane hosted North Carolina last Friday night to open the season and was quickly dispatched, 95-75. The Green Wave then returned Monday to beat Southeastern Louisiana, 93-76. Longtime NBA head coach Mike Dunleavy is now the man in charge in New Orleans, but it will take him some time to instill his values and system into a program that has long been considered a basketball backwater. If Oklahoma beats Tulane, the Sooners will then face the winner of Arizona State and Northern Iowa on Friday — both of which are beatable. Read the rest of this entry »

Once again it looks like the Big 12 regular season title will remain in Kansas. Bill Self’s team enters this season as the prohibitive favorite to win a 13th straight championship, but the good news is that there is plenty of great non-conference basketball to sustain us until conference teams take turns trying to knock the Jayhawks from their perch. Most Big 12 teams will play tough November and December schedules featuring several preseason top 10 teams and tough mid-majors. Notably excluded from this list are games from January’s Big 12/SEC Challenge, but here’s a look at the league’s best 10 non-conference games through the first two months of the season.

Kansas is poised to win another Big 12 title, but the non-conference games come first. (USA Today Images)

• 10. Oklahoma State vs. Connecticut, Monday November 21 – This is an opening round game at the Maui Invitational, and while the Cowboys may struggle to beat a ranked Connecticut team on the Valley Isle, the individual match-up between point guards Jawun Evans and Jalen Adams makes this must-see TV.
• 9. Texas at Michigan, Tuesday December 6 – John Beilein’s Michigan teams play a beautiful brand of offensive basketball that the Longhorns will look to muck up by increasing tempo and using their athleticism to outrun the Wolverines in Ann Arbor.
• 8. Oklahoma at Wisconsin, Saturday December 3 – The Badgers open the season as the Big Ten favorite so Oklahoma will have its hands full in Madison. Guard Jordan Woodard will need to deliver a Buddy Hield-esque performance for the Sooners to come away with an upset in this one.

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As RTC heads into its 10th season — Season X, if you will — covering college basketball, it’s time to begin releasing our annual compendium of YouTube clips that we like to call Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball. These 30 snippets from last season’s action are completely guaranteed to make you wish games were starting tonight rather than 30 days from now. Over the next month you’ll get one reason per day until we reach the new season on Friday, November 11. You can find all of this year’s released posts here.

#8 – Where Fractions Happens.

We also encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16 preseasons.

As RTC heads into its 10th season — Season X, if you will — covering college basketball, it’s time to begin releasing our annual compendium of YouTube clips that we like to call Thirty Reasons We Love College Basketball. These 30 snippets from last season’s action are completely guaranteed to make you wish games were starting tonight rather than 30 days from now. Over the next month you’ll get one reason per day until we reach the new season on Friday, November 11. You can find all of this year’s released posts here.

#13 – Where Buddy Buckets Happens.

We also encourage you to re-visit the entire archive of this feature from the 2008-09, 2009-10, 2010-11, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16 preseasons.

March is sadistic. For all but one school, the month — and the few days of April we tend to group with it — inevitably ends in sorrow. For some teams like Texas or USC, that ending is abrupt, brought on by last second heroics that put an end to a once-promising season. For others, the ending is an excruciating wait. So it was for Oklahoma last season. Midway through the campaign, the Sooners were the top-ranked team in the AP poll. By the end of it, they had made the school’s first Final Four since 2002. In Houston, though, Oklahoma was steamrolled, losing to eventual national champion Villanova by the largest margin in Final Four history. With each missed three-pointer, the conclusion became clearer. It was like watching a car accident in slow motion.

Jordean Woodard will have the keys to the engine with Buddy Buckets now gone. (USA TODAY Sports)

Now, Lon Kruger‘s team will have to rebuild its proverbial car and the model will look substantially different than last season. Gone are starters Buddy Hield, Isaiah Cousins and Ryan Spangler. The NPOY Hield, of course, will leave the biggest shoes to fill, but Cousins was a dogged defender and effective three-point shooter while Spangler was an experienced stretch four who brought a certain toughness to the team. Gone are 66.5 percent of the team’s total scoring and 59.2 percent of its total minutes played. Also gone is 7’0″ center Akolda Manyang, a potentially valuable rotation piece who was dismissed after being arrested for aggravated robbery. With so much of its Final Four roster no longer residing in Norman, Kruger will put one of his returning upperclassmen into the driver’s seat of the new model.  

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Whether you’ve noticed or not, college basketball is almost here. The league schedules have been released, public practices like Kansas’ Late Night in the Phog and Iowa State’s Hilton Madness have either come and gone or are on the horizon, blurbs are emerging of players losing weight or adding muscle, and coaches are talking about how they want to play faster and take pages from NBA teams’ playbooks. Even though college football, the NFL and baseball’s playoffs tend to dominate the national sports conversation this time of year, it’s nevertheless a good opportunity to start looking at the hoops season ahead (and let’s be honest, any time is a good time to talk hoops around here). We’ll have much, much more to come over the next month as the season draws near, but in the interest of keeping things simple at the opening tip, here are three storylines that will define one of the nation’s top conferences in 2016-17.

Bill Self’s Jayhawks are well-positioned for yet another conference title in 2017. (John Rieger/USA TODAY Sports)

1. Kansas goes for #13 – The Jayhawks lost one of the Big 12’s elder statesmen in Perry Ellis as well as two other mainstays in Wayne Selden and Jamari Traylor, but Bill Self‘s team is going to be loaded once again. Frank Mason and Devonte’ Graham are back as the two-headed monster in the backcourt, Landen Lucas will hold own the center spot after running away with the job last season and Svi Mykhailiuk returns to provide an X-factor opposing coaches will have to respect, even if he only sees 10-15 minutes per game. Oh, and the potential #1 overall pick in next June’s draft in Josh Jackson will slide easily into Selden’s old spot, bringing versatility, rebounding and that #motor to the wing that Self loves so much. This team isn’t without questions — particularly how effective Carlton Bragg will be as a sophomore — but while there’s usually a token competitor who contrarians pick to upend the Jayhawks in the Big 12, the reality is that there’s no good reason to bet against Kansas matching both Gonzaga and the John Wooden-era UCLA teams with 13 consecutive regular season conference titles. Read the rest of this entry »

In sending three teams to the Sweet Sixteen, two to the Elite Eight and one to the Final Four, the Big 12 put together a solid NCAA Tournament, but it wasn’t enough to put to rest its reputation as a group of postseason underperformers. The 2015-16 campaign wasn’t without its highlights, though. The story of the season nationally was the prevalence of experienced veterans over one-and-done interlopers, and the Big 12 played a key role in that narrative with seniors Buddy Hield, Perry Ellis and Georges Niang leading their teams deep into March. With those three studs (among others) moving on, though, it’s time to examine the burning question that each Big 12 team faces this offseason. Today we review Oklahoma, Kansas, Kansas State, Baylor and TCU.

Oklahoma (29-8, 12-6)

Oklahoma faces a rebuild as it loses Big 12 scoring king and National Player of the Year Buddy Hield. (David K Purdy/Getty Images)

What will the identity of post-Hield Oklahoma become? Between Hield, Isaiah Cousins, Ryan Spangler and Dinjyl Walker, Oklahoma is losing 64 percent of the scoring from last season’s lethal offensive unit. That’s a lot. Though we trust that head coach Lon Kruger will find a way eventually, in the meantime, the Sooners will face a tough road in the wake of heavy roster turnover. Jordan Woodard and Khadeem Lattin are expected back and there are some intriguing newcomers arriving in Kameron McGusty, Christian Doolittle and former Ohio State commitment Austin Grandstaff. But it’s tough to suffer the level of production Oklahoma is losing and still be expected to perform at a level comparable to last season’s Final Four squad. Very few programs in college basketball can reload that quickly.

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Before this season, Villanova was the school that couldn’t get the job done in March. The Wildcats — seemingly always a high seed — had not made it past the round of 32 since 2009 (the last time they were in the Final Four), and for the entirety of this season, they were told that the only thing that mattered was what they accomplished in the season’s final three weeks. It was, as the Big East microsite’s Justin Kundrat put it, Villanova’s most burning question entering the NCAA Tournament. One month, six wins, and a historically dramatic three-pointer later, that criticism disappeared amid the confetti tumbling down to the NRG Stadium floor. Who now fills Villanova’s place as the perennial March underachiever? How about an entire conference — the Big 12 finds itself in a spot similar to where Jay Wright’s team was living. For any number of reasons, it has become the league that consistently delivers impressive regular season results and earns plenty of good to great seeds in the NCAA Tournament, only to generally flame out without making much of an impact on the event’s climactic final weekend.

Oklahoma was the Big 12’s final NCAA Tournament casualty this season. (David J. Phillip, AP)

A review of the past 12 NCAA Tournaments — dating back to Bill Self’s first of 12 straight regular season conference titles, and the source of so many “If Kansas wins it every year, how good can it really be?” arguments — illustrates the Big 12’s failings. The league has made the Final Four just three times in that span, with only two schools, Kansas and Oklahoma, navigating their way to the sport’s final weekend. That the Jayhawks’ close loss to Villanova in the Elite Eight this season was followed by a historic 44-point drubbing of the Sooners six days later did not inspire much confidence in the depth of the league. Digging a bit more deeply, conference teams playing their opening round games as the higher seed have compiled a rather uninspiring 37-17 record over that span, which includes six losses to lower seeded teams in the past two years. Put simply, the Big 12 hasn’t delivered at the time of year when everyone in the country is watching. Read the rest of this entry »