No. 5 seeded Oklahoma on Friday was eliminated from the SEC Women’s Basketball Tournament with a 112-78 blowout loss to No. 4 LSU. The loss came a day after OU had to overcome a slow start to beat No. 12 Florida 82-64 to advance to the quarterfinal, and although different results, the same problem plagued the Sooners in both games.
Although extremely talented as a top-10 team most of the season, there was fear that inexperience would be the Sooners’ weakness once games started to matter the most in March. That had been a consistent issue all season when an opponent matched OU’s talent level for a big game, as the Sooners are 1-7 against top-10 teams this season after a second deficit to LSU.
It then took just one game into the postseason for OU head coach Jennie Baranczyk to confirm that inexperience will be something the Sooners will have to overcome throughout March Madness to get deeper than last year’s Sweet 16 run, or even match it.
Inexperience already haunting OU women in SEC Tournament
“This is a first for half of our team,” Baranczyk said after the Florida win. “We’re still really young. This is their first SEC Tournament, and you could see that in the first half. You could see that we came out excited, then all of a sudden it was like we’re all panicking. So we just need to steady up, and I think we obviously have really good leadership, but we’re still young.”…