That was fast.
In the blink of an eye, Oklahoma went from unranked to No. 24 and now all the way up to No. 9 in Monday’s AP Poll. The Sooners will now be the higher ranked team in Monday night’s road matchup with No. 13 Texas Tech.
A team that was written off by many after a tough loss to Xavier and because of an overly-stacked Big 12 is suddenly in a position to play itself into second place in the league. Who could have possibly seen this coming?
Simon Gerszberg did.
Gerszberg is the creator of Shot Quality, a service that tracks and grades every shot taken by NCAA teams. Using this metric, we can get an idea which teams are playing the best basketball, independent of the randomness of the rim.
Good news for Oklahoma fans: Shot Quality doesn’t just like the Sooners. It loves them. Oklahoma ranks sixth in the country in total adjusted shot quality, and that’s not a new development either.
“[Oklahoma has] been in the top 10, I think, for a few weeks now, so it’s interesting to see how they are finally starting to play like that (wins over Texas and Kansas) which confirms the algorithm’s projection,” Gerszberg said.
Indeed, Shot Quality rates Oklahoma as the second-best team in the conference, even above a national title contender in Texas. All ten Big 12 teams are charted by offensive and defensive Shot Quality below.
By thinking outside the box and looking for a new way to evaluate teams, Gerszberg has created a tool that offers value even in comparison to predictive powerhouses like the Vegas line.
“There definitely are some differences because we are looking at the game from a different perspective,” Gerszberg said. “A team can win by 20 and actually go down in the rankings if that team just happened to hit a bunch of lucky shots in that particular game. That’s obviously contrary to how Vegas and Kenpom rank teams.”
Oklahoma was a 1-point underdog heading into Saturday’s matchup with Alabama, but Gerszberg told me on Friday that his numbers had the Sooners pegged as a 5-7 point favorite over the Crimson Tide. Oklahoma won by five.
There a great number of takeaways to be had here. Perhaps the most meaningful of which is this: what Oklahoma is doing right now shouldn’t come as a surprise, and there’s no reason to expect it to end any time soon.
In fact, for at least one person that’s been looking closely, this was always the expected outcome.
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