Porter Moser calls out Oklahoma players for lack of resilience in SEC

Porter Moser hasn’t been happy with the fight by Oklahoma to this point of play in the SEC.

Moser went in on the issues the Sooners are having in their efforts during his postgame press conference following their 70-52 loss to No. 4 Tennessee on Saturday. He said that they aren’t fighting like they were in games earlier on in the season with their past two games being his evidence of that.

“Well, I thought what, what we’ve done earlier in the year that we’re not doing right now is, emotionally and physically, fighting through hard times in a game,” said Moser. “I thought, over and over, we talked about we had resiliency fighting through some of these games, early games.

“We haven’t fought emotionally and in resiliency when it got hard in that game.”

Again, this has been the case for Oklahoma over the last week against No. 1 Auburn and No. 4 Tennessee. The Tigers and Volunteers won by an average margin of 23 points with the average largest lead being at 29 points. Each were over pretty quickly too as double-digit halftime leads turned into those large final margins.

To Moser, that happened to the Sooners because they did not handle those early deficits well in either. That was especially so against the Vols with the defense just getting to them to a point where they never recovered.

“You know, they were knocking down shots. I think they made their first five. I don’t think, emotionally, we handled that. We were really ramped up to play and we could never string some baskets together. We couldn’t go on – we’ve gone in runs in this building and got the energy in this building going. We could never get any energy going and we could never cause that because we just couldn’t get a string of made shots, you know,” Moser said. “We know they’re elite defensively. They are. But I thought we had some, some looks. I thought we had some looks, layups and we just couldn’t string any kind of run together the whole night. I don’t know if we ever made three of them in a row. It just seemed like we’d make one and then we’d miss a lauyup or we’d miss a good shot.

“Mental toughness is you come out, you’re ready to play. And, you know, they hit some shots. I mean, they made some shots, they got an offensive rebound dunk, and we missed a wide-open layup. It’s to fight through that, alright. It’s early. I just, I think we’re not emotionally together fighting through that, the hard parts of the game, right now. And we’re playing elite teams with that..It’s happened two games in a row that, you know, some things didn’t go our way and we couldn’t string it together and the lead just ballooned. When that lead ballooned, you know, you’re trying to fight back, you know, from a 20-point deficit. We cut it to 15 to start the second half and then they got it back up to 24.”

It’s not going to get any easier for Oklahoma with six of their final eight in the regular season being against ranked opponents. That’ll then be that much harder for them if they repeat either of their outings from last week.

“Absolutely disappointed in fighting through Tennessee’s runs and their physicality,” Moser said.