After Oklahoma was left out of the NCAA Tournament, Sooners coach Porter Moser had a message for his team.
“If we just lay an egg and don’t come out and play with passion, everyone on the committee can just say, ‘You know what? We were right,'” Moser told them. “But how do you prove them wrong? How do you prove they made a mistake? That’s our choice. Our choice is to go out there and fight and prepare and compete and do our best.”
The Sooners, one of the first four out of the NCAA Tournament, did just that in the first round of the NIT and look to continue it Sunday night when they host St. Bonaventure in Norman, Okla.
Oklahoma beat Missouri State 89-72 at home in the first round, its fifth win in six games.
The Sooners (19-15) and Bonnies have met just once before, an Oklahoma win more than 20 years ago (2001) in Norman. However, Moser and his St. Bonaventure counterpart, Mark Schmidt, are plenty familiar with each other.
The start of Schmidt’s tenure with the Bonnies (21-9) lined up with the start of Moser’s four-season stint as an assistant under Rick Majerus at Saint Louis, with the teams regularly facing off in Atlantic 10 play.
Schmidt was hired by athletic director Steve Watson, who later moved to Loyola-Chicago where Moser had been hired as head coach after his time with Majerus.
“I became friends with Mark that way,” Moser said. “I followed St. Bonaventure closely. They were an NCAA Tournament team last year. They’ve got all those guys back.”
The Bonnies started off the NIT with a 76-68 win at Colorado.
The win in Boulder was St. Bonaventure’s first over a major-conference opponent on the road since a win at Syracuse in 2017, but the Bonnies aren’t lacking in confidence after starting the season in the top 25 and winning games against Clemson and Marquette early in the season.
“Momentum can be fleeting,” Schmidt said. “But in terms of confidence, we’re confident we can compete with anybody. Our guys have shown that, so win or lose the prior game, the guys have confidence that they can play well and they can beat anybody.”
–Field Level Media
