Sooners have second toughest remaining schedule according to ESPN’s BPI

According to ESPN’s BPI metric, Sooners have the second toughest remaining schedule in the country.

While the Oklahoma Sooners couldn’t come out on top against 7th-ranked Texas to close out 2022, Oklahoma enters the year 2023 with ample opportunities to bolster its resume and solidify itself as an NCAA tournament team.

Per ESPN’s BPI metric, the Oklahoma Sooners have the nation’s second-toughest schedule remaining.

BPI is a measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of performance going forward. BPI represents how many points above or below average a team is looking at current stats, schedules, and projections to calculate it.

Every Big 12 team is in the top 10. The major takeaway is that the Big 12 is far and away the toughest basketball conference in the country.

 

Oklahoma’s Big 12 journey is about to heat up. The only non-conference game they have remaining will be against a top-10 Alabama Crimson Tide team as a part of the Big 12-SEC Challenge.

In this predictive model, Oklahoma finishes somewhere between 16 to 17 wins and fourteen losses. Their projected conference record lands somewhere around 7-11. With all that taken into account, they have less than a 1% chance of winning the Big 12.

While that seems less than ideal, Oklahoma has road trips to Baylor, Texas, Kansas, and Iowa State still on its plate. All four squads are ranked, with Kansas being the highest at No. 3 nationally. A 2-2 split in those road games is the most ideal outcome and would give Oklahoma plenty of quality wins for their NCAA Tournament resume.

Taking care of business at home also matters, given the circumstances. There won’t be any easy games on the conference schedule, and while it holds well for the league come selection time, it also means Oklahoma can’t have lapses or multi-game losing streaks. Coming up just short against No. 6 Texas may not feel like a big loss, but letting that one slip away hurts. Opening Big 12 play with a win over one of the best teams in the country would have provided a huge boost to the Sooners’ resume.

Porter Moser’s team came up short last year in large part because of their work in the conference. This year an early loss to Sam Houston State in the first game of the season looks terrible on Oklahoma’s resume. So finishing as high in the conference as they can be the best way to push that loss further away from how the committee views Oklahoma.

Kansas, the standard bearer and reigning national champion, has the second-highest probability (21.7%) of winning the regular season title behind Oklahoma’s biggest rivals, Texas, who sits at 68.3 %. This predictive model believes the Big 12 is a two-team race.

While that may true, all the Sooners can do is lock in and try and steal a few games against some of the nation’s best competition.

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