Is Oklahoma State Overrated Or Underrated In Basketball?

At the dawn of the 21st season of Big 12 basketball, OSU was picked last week to finish seventh in the conference. Kansas of course was picked to win the league (again), and only Kansas State and TCU were picked to finish below the Pokes.

This got me wondering how accurate (ack-u-rut) these preseason Big 12 coaches polls are. We look at this for football picks every preseason, but rarely for hoops so I went back and found where OSU was picked compared to where it finished for each of its 20 basketball seasons and compared it to football.

The results were surprising. It is apparently a lot harder to pick where OSU basketball will finish than OSU football (I think basketball is much more difficult generally, Kansas aside, because the basketball side has never had six-team divisions which were always much easier to slot). Here’s how much the preseason polls missed by on average over the last 20 years.

So it’s over twice as difficult historically to pick OSU hoops as OSU football.

The number of big misses was even greater, though. I define a “big miss” as whiffing by three or more spots either way in the preseason picks. So if you were picked to finish fifth and you finish first or second (or eighth or ninth), that’s a “big miss.”

Wow. Here is where each team has been picked over the last 20 years. As you can see, the OSU football team has been easy to peg, and the OSU basketball team has been perpetually overrated.

And here’s a breakdown by coaches.

So this means that coaches traditionally overrated Eddie Sutton by .3 spots which basically means they nailed him on average. The reality here, though, is that they overrated him a lot (OSU was picked to win the league in 1998-99 and finished fifth) and underrated him a lot (OSU was picked to finish fifth in 2003-04 and won the league).

Sean Sutton was overrated by three slots. Travis Ford was overrated by over a spot (his big whiff came in 2013-14 when OSU was picked to win the league and finished eighth). Hopefully Brad Underwood will be able to lead this team to a fifth or fourth place finish in his first season and get into the positive numbers right off the bat.

Here’s a full look of projected vs. actual for OSU over the last 20 years.