Stillwater NewsPress

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March 14, 2010

Cowboys fully in NCAA mode

By Scott Nulph Stillwater NewsPress

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For the second straight year, the Oklahoma State Cowboys wake up today on Selection Sunday not wondering if the team will make the NCAA tournament, just who they play and where they’re headed.

The CBS Selection Show starts at 5 p.m. and the Cowboys (22-10) have been safely inside the NCAA tournament field since closing with a 6-2 run before falling 83-64 to Kansas State in the Big12 tournament quarterfinals on Wednesday.

That run included an 85-77 win over No. 1 Kansas in Stillwater.

The Cowboys hoped to use a long run in the Big 12 tourney to improve their seeding. That ended with the Wildcats on Thursday.

“I thought we could only help ourselves,” OSU coach Travis Ford said following the loss to the Wildcats on NCAA seeding. “I thought we helped ourselves last night (beating Oklahoma in the first round). I thought every win that we could get in this tournament would help us.”

Ford added, however, that he’s not the one who tries to figure out what the NCAA Selection Committee will do.

“There’s no way to figure it out, because you don’t know exactly what to do,” Ford said. “I think if you sit and try to figure out the whole thing it would drive you crazy.”

Kind of like his Cowboys this season.

Oklahoma State went 12-2 in nonconference play, including a solid showing in the Las Vegas Invitational, beating Bradley and Utah in Las Vegas for the championship.

The losses came at Tulsa (86-65) and to Rhode Island (63-59) in Uncasville, Conn.

The Big 12 season was a bit of a roller coaster – with two 3-game winning streaks wrapped around a 2-game and 3-game losing skid.

The low part of the conference season may have come in Lubbock on Feb. 6, an 81-74 loss to Texas Tech that dropped OSU to 4-5 in the Big 12.

The Cowboys then recovered to rout Oklahoma 97-76 in Stillwater a week later to start their closing run.

Most NCAA tournament projections show Oklahoma State between a No. 7 and No. 9 seed.

ESPN.com has OSU a No. 8 seed in the East Region playing No. 9 Louisville in Milwaukee. CBSSportsline.com has OSU a No. 7 seed in the Midwest Region playing No. 10 San Diego State in Milwaukee. And Collegerpi.com has the Cowboys as a No. 8 seed in the East, playing No. 9 Virginia Tech in Buffalo.

No matter where the Cowboys go or who they play, Ford said his team will need to keep improving as the final phase of the season gets underway.

“We’ve got some work to do,” Ford said. “We’ve got to go out and continue to build this thing. We’re still building, still a ways away.

“But we’ve been able to compete with the best in this league with what we’ve got. We’ve got 22 wins with a young basketball team.”

Big 12 Player of the Year James Anderson agreed.

“We just gotta get back to the gym and start preparing for whoever we are going to face in the tournament and just start getting our team back on the positive side,” he said.

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