Steve Lutz and Porter Moser called dueling timeouts, each trying to quiet the opposing side’s crowd in the half-crimson, half-orange Paycom Center.
Bedlam basketball felt … alive.
“Honestly, it was quite shocking,” OU guard Nijel Pack said. “I kind of thought it’d be better to play home-and-home, but for the crowd to come out like this and fill up the NBA arena, it was awesome.”
My thoughts exactly.
I walked into Paycom Center on Saturday expecting a blah environment for what I thought would be two pretty exciting games. The men’s one was — an 85-76 OU win — the women’s game not so much — 92-70 Sooners — but the real winner Saturday was the concept of neutral-site Bedlam basketball.
I was skeptical. Cynical, more like it. So many of the best non-conference college basketball games are played at neutral sites. Sterile sites. And here was another. It’s bad enough that we lost Big 12 Bedlam, so to water down the rivalry further by playing in an NBA arena? Bah humbug.
But like Pack, a college basketball lifer, I too was quite shocked at how good the atmosphere was.
An annual Bedlam basketball doubleheader in downtown Oklahoma City might actually be a good idea. And whether you agree or not, I think it’s here to stay. At Paycom Center, and then to the new arena once it opens.
After I asked Moser if he’d like to go back to a home-and-home Bedlam series — ”I would need time to process that,” Moser said, “but right now I would say no” — OU athletic director Joe Castiglione gave me a playful thumbs down from the back of the interview room.
There is no momentum to bring Bedlam basketball back to Norman and Stillwater. This is the new reality. Two years in, it has the chance to be a longtime tradition.
“The idea behind this was to create a weekend everybody can anticipate every single year,” Castiglione said.
A rivalry game on the second Saturday of a month with a 50/50 crimson and orange split?
Bedlam hoops isn’t the Red River Rivalry and Paycom Center is no Cotton Bowl, but you can see the seeds of where this idea came from.
Castiglione oversaw something similar during his time at Missouri, when the annual Braggin’ Rights series between Missouri and Illinois became an annual game in St. Louis. Castiglione said the Braggin’ Rights game was inspired by, you guessed it, OU-Texas.
“I know exactly how we built that game and how it became a must-see event,” Castiglione said.
“We have a spectacular building right here, right between the two of us, home of the world champions — why wouldn’t that be a great thing?” Castiglione added. “The players love it because they get the chance to play on the same court, in the same arena as the Thunder. You don’t get that chance very often.”
The announced attendance Saturday was 10,552, up slightly from the 10,300 last year when only the men played, and at a later tip time (7 p.m.). The year-to-year growth felt a lot bigger than those numbers suggest.
While Castiglione is passionate about the idea, he knows he doesn’t have much say in its staying power. OU will soon have a new athletic director and it will be their job to negotiate with OSU AD Chad Weiberg on the future of Bedlam basketball.
All four coaches more or less agreed that this neutral-site series works. But OSU’s Lutz and Jacie Hoyt suggested an amendment.
Added Lutz: “Maybe we should try a new venue, because we haven’t shot the ball well at Paycom either year,” he said, only half-kidding. “I want us to continue to play Bedlam. I told Porter straight up: We can play it in Norman and Stillwater, we can play at Paycom and Tulsa, we can do whatever, but we need to switch this rotation year by year in my opinion.”
“I would love to have something in Tulsa,” Hoyt said. “I like that idea of flip-flopping back and forth, but ultimately this was an incredible experience, and if it’s always here, we’re gonna embrace every second of it.”
Here’s the deal, though: OSU fans outnumbered OU fans on Saturday. They were quite a bit louder, too, during the noon men’s game. That might have flipped during the 3 p.m. women’s game.
Stillwater is an hour from Oklahoma City and an hour from Tulsa. Norman is half an hour from Oklahoma City and two hours to Tulsa. OSU understandably feels more at home in Tulsa than in Oklahoma City, but the Sooners didn’t have a home-court advantage Saturday. Cowboys and Cowgirls fans made sure of it.
Here’s another reason to keep the series in OKC: It meant something for the players to compete on the same court, in the same gym as the Thunder.
“What a cool experience for us to play where the world champions play,” Hoyt said. “Micah (Gray) is an Oklahoma City girl. She’s been watching the Thunder her whole life. Little things like that are really, really cool.”
Baranczyk said she hopes games like this will inspire the next generation of Oklahoma basketball players.
“Because if you can see it, you can become it,” Baranczyk said. “Our sport is booming on a national level, and so we have to continue to have it rise here in the state of Oklahoma … It’s not just about Oklahoma playing Oklahoma State, it’s about providing people an opportunity to come watch these amazing men and these amazing women on one afternoon in December.”
Perhaps the start of a new Bedlam tradition.
Joe Mussatto is a sports columnist for The Oklahoman. Have a story idea for Joe? Email him at [email protected]. Support Joe's work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today at subscribe.oklahoman.com.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Could a Bedlam doubleheader in OKC be new basketball tradition?