Porter Moser has been 'fired up since Selection Sunday' after NCAA Tournament snub

As college football gets ready to start, college basketball teams are breaking from their summer program and beginning to hunker down for the bulk of preseason training. Oklahoma coach Porter Moser has an especially challenging task.

He has to ready his program for its first season competing in the new-look SEC. But he is itching to start.

“Trust me, I’ve been fired up since Selection Sunday,” Porter Moser said on SEC Now on Tuesday night. “And a lot of different emotions since last year being the last one out. I’m excited to get going again to get this feeling out of my gut, just to compete and grow the team and all those things in the new league.”

Oklahoma has been a little bit up and down since Moser took over, winning 20 games last season but failing to reach the NCAA Tournament for the third straight season under his watch.

The goal, of course, will be to reach the Big Dance this year. That doesn’t happen overnight.

“I think it’s a journey,” Porter Moser said. “Today I just came from our first workout downstairs. Everyone in the country was there, did their eight weeks in the summer. And that’s the beginning, man, coming together.

“I like the makeup of our guys in terms of their work ethic, their willingness to come in and listen and be coached and the attention to detail. So I like the makeup of it. It’s early. It’s early. We’ve got a long way to go on both ends. But man, I just like the energy of this group and that’s a great starting point.”

As for the rest, Moser has spent plenty of time sizing up his competition. He’s well aware that just about every team in the SEC is competitive on a night-in, night-out basis.

He needs to look no further than the transfer portal for evidence of that.

“What I think the coaches do know is the coaches have such an awareness of the players in the portal,” Porter Moser said. “Like trust me, we’re following this thing, so we know, all right, this team just got four really good ones in the portal. We know. So we know as coaches is who’s loading up. The thing we don’t know is what teams are really going to mesh this many newcomers together. What teams are going to put their egos aside and mesh with nine new guys.

“That’s going to be a, that’s what you don’t know. But what I do know is I thought the SEC hit grand slams in recruiting. I know what the other teams did. I feel really good about what we did. And I know this league smashed it in the portal. The unknown is how are all these guys going to work together coming together so fast with so many newcomers on each team.”

Porter Moser hopes his bunch will solve that riddle adequately enough.