Every college basketball season produces a surprise or two. But sometimes a result comes along that makes you stop and look at the scoreboard twice. That happened Monday night in Norman, Oklahoma.
East Texas A&M, a team picked to finish last in the Southland Conference, walked into Oklahoma’s Lloyd Noble Center as a 29-point underdog. The Sooners are an SEC program with considerably bigger expectations. The Lions were supposed to be making up the numbers.
Instead, East Texas A&M walked out with a 68-64 victory and one of the most remarkable season-opening wins college basketball has seen in years.
East Texas A&M Delivered the Second-Biggest Upset in Three Decades
Think about that for a moment. This wasn’t simply a lower-ranked team beating a more established opponent. According to ESPN, it was the second-biggest upset in more than 100,000 Division I games over the past three decades. Only Eastern Illinois’ 2022 victory over heavily favoured Iowa ranked as a bigger betting upset.
What makes this result interesting is that the Lions didn’t need some extraordinary offensive performance to pull it off. They played defence, stayed in the game and made the shots that mattered. They actually held Oklahoma to 29 percent shooting in the first half and finished with a significant advantage from three-point range, shooting 41 percent to Oklahoma’s 25.
Bo Aldridge led the way with 22 points in just 25 minutes. Mohamed Diakite and Alonzo Dodd chipped in 15 apiece. But there’s another part of this story worth considering.
East Texas A&M’s Coach Knows There’s More to Come
East Texas A&M coach Jaret von Rosenberg wasn’t talking as though his team had just reached the mountaintop. He acknowledged the performance wasn’t perfect and suggested his players had more to come. That’s an encouraging message. A win like this can give a relatively unknown program something that preseason rankings and conference predictions can’t provide: belief.
For Oklahoma, the lesson is a little less comfortable. Coach Porter Moser apologized to the fans and admitted his team played on its heels. The loss also ended the Sooners’ 30-game nonconference home winning streak.
East Texas A&M Has Something More Valuable Than a Surprise Win
Nobody should judge an entire season by one November night. But Oklahoma has some work to do, and East Texas A&M deserves the credit for making that happen. The Lions now head to Houston to face Rice on Thursday. They’ll be favourites in nobody’s eyes for very long if they keep playing this way.
And that’s perhaps the best part of this story. East Texas A&M came into the season with very little attention. It took one night to change that. College basketball just got a little more interesting.
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