The only guaranteed way for Oklahoma to make the NCAA Tournament field is to win the Big 12 Tournament and that begins Thursday night with game against Baylor, the No. 3 ranked team in the nation.

OU (17-14, 7-11 in the Big 12) is the No. 7 seed in the tournament and plays Baylor at 6 p.m. Thursday on ESPN2.  OU lost to Baylor 74-84 on January 4 in Waco and 51-65 in Norman on January 22.

In the first game, OU hit only 5 of 20 three-point attempts while Baylor managed 6 completions in 14 attempts. In the second game, OU missed 14 of 20 three-point shots while Baylor hit 6 of 10.

Should the Sooners upset Baylor, they would play the winner of the Texas Tech/Iowa State second round game. OU split with both of those teams this season. That game would be 8:30 p.m. Friday on ESPN2.

Oklahoma has an outside chance at an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament but another loss to Baylor might end that.

Last Saturday, OU’s Umoja Gibson hit seven three-point shots and scored 29 points on sizzling shooting (9 of 14 from the field) as the Sooners downed Kansas State 78-71 in Manhattan.

“You know, Kansas State’s defense is elite,” said OU coach Porter Moser. “I mean, they’re so physical. They’re well drilled. They scout well. And he got free for some. And for him to get 20 in the first half, got us out of the gate and to free some things up and for him to stay with it. And man, he made some huge shots for us.”

Against KSU, Tanner Groves had 14 points as OU won three games in a row after a four-game skid.

“It was huge,” Moser said of the KSU win. “I mean, we knew what we had to do, and we mentioned just taking it one step at a time.

“ And I’m just proud of the resiliency of this group. Just asked many times about how’s it going?  We came back, we had back-to-back bad losses, and not in terms of bad losses because we played elite teams in Iowa State and Texas Tech, but we didn’t play well and it didn’t give us a game. We’ve been in almost every game. We weren’t in those games.

“And that we come back and just to regroup and talk about taking one at a time, we’ve got to win the Oklahoma State game. We put that in the bank, then West Virginia, and then we all knew we’ve got to come in and end this thing on the road.”

That victory pushed OU in the No. 7 seeding in the Big 12 and made K-State a No. 8 seed. Kansas State played West Virginia Wednesday night with the winner advancing to play No. 1 seed Kansas in the second round.

Oklahoma State was ineligible for post-season play and that changed the Big 12 bracket to only one play-in game and pushed OU into the second round as the No. 7 seed.

Iowa State is the No. 6 seed even though they had the same league mark as OU.

The Cyclones hold the tiebreaker over the Sooners due to a split with No. 4 Texas. ISU and OU lost both of their games against the top three teams and OU lost both to UT.

Kansas and Baylor shared the 2021-22 Big 12 men’s basketball regular season title after both completed the conference season with 14-4 records.

The Jayhawks claimed their 20th regular season championship and an NCAA record 63rd all-time while BU won its second consecutive Big 12 crown.