Our basketball team has struggled this year. That much is obvious. They just got shellacked by Baylor, a team that hadn't beat OU since 1977. They have fallen in just about every computerized rating system over the past couple of weeks. Their "defensive" stats on the KenPom site is a blur of different shades of red - indicating that they don't really have a defense. In fact, based on his ratings, OU is only projected to win 2 conference games, and they stand a 1.17% chance of posting a winless conference record - not a great chance, but not a non-zero one either.
So is it a matter of poor coaching, or a matter of players who just seem to not want to put in the effort to be a competitive D-1 basketball team? I'll let you guys hash that out in the comments section.
One more interesting factoid: Willie Warren has the 19th highest Usage% of any player in the country. Usage percentage is just a measure of what fraction of the possessions a player will use when they are on the court to try to score and what-not. There are thousands of D-1 basketball players. Thousands! And Willie Warren uses the ball more than all but 18 players.
But here's the punchline - this season, Warren is not the most efficient offensive player on our team. Not by a long shot. He's only scoring 1.057 points per possession (PPP) that he uses, which puts him in Ryan Wright's company (1.047). Tiny Gallon, Cade Davis, Tommy Mason-Griffin, Tony Crocker, and Steven Pledger all have MUCH higher values, and Gallon, Crocker, and Pledger rank among the top 200 nationally in offensive efficiency.
Food for thought.