A season of faith for OU basketball head coach Porter Moser

After every close, last-second loss, there would be OU head coach Porter Moser. Maybe a little disappointed, maybe a little frustrated, but he kept coming.

The message was the same. If Moser had a negative attitude, negative approach, then how could the players bounce back?

There were so many moments where the Sooners could have folded. Or where you thought they absolutely would pack it in.

Between the home losses to LSU and Texas A&M and Kentucky, if you wanted to be tested, this season did just that.

Losing in ways you thought couldn’t even be fathomable. Blowing leads like the Aggies, a meltdown vs. the Tigers, gut-punched by a former Sooner against the Wildcats. Like, c’mon, write a different script. This can only happen so much.

But Moser never lost hope. It was a season of faith that helped bring the Sooners back to the NCAA Tournament.

“I’ve been in it a long time, and what I did is I leaned on my faith,” Moser said. “My faith is my foundation for everything. My family is my foundation for everything.

“What I learned is that like everything, how you think is how you feel. How you feel is how you act, how you act defines you. How I thought is God’s got a plan. There’s a resiliency, an energy level you have to have in life to fight through hard, and there were a lot of hard times.”

The hard times, obviously, weren’t just limited to this season. Everybody knows about OU being dubbed the First Team Out last season. You can see how much that day still means to Moser and for that team. They felt they earned that right and had it snatched away.

It was one of the hardest days of his professional life, but Moser kept pushing forward. The team, coming into this year, pushed forward. And they found it this season.

“If you lean on your faith and you lean on your family and you lean on your locker room, your friends, your teammates, your co-workers, those people are the ones that matter,” Moser said. “It wasn’t that I learned that about myself, it was that those are previous lessons I learned on my life journey, that that’s what you do when times are tough. That’s when I’m happy for these young people because I think they learned that lesson too this year. A lot of young guys were in there fighting every day.

“We’d come out with a tough loss, and I would come in the locker room, guys, we have a path. We’ve got to play better basketball, we’ve got to do this. They just kept on getting up, we just kept getting up and kept getting up and fighting through hard.”

It’s that type of attitude that can now benefit the Sooners in the transfer portal. Hey, you’re not going to get them all. Not every Plan A choice is going to say OU is the place to be. But you keep plugging away.

Fall down and rise again. It’s that type of attitude, that type of resolve that shows why Moser is the right guy for what’s going on in Norman.

It might have taken an extra season than what Moser and the program had hoped for to reach the Big Dance, but it happened. No heartbreak on Selection Sunday, you’re in. Now? You build off of it. And Moser will do that the only way he knows how – through his faith.

And right now? That’s through the transfer portal. That culture that Moser has harped on so much about during his four years in Norman could be ready to take off.