Jay Bilas Is Still Buying Stock in Oklahoma Men's Basketball Despite Opening-Night Disaster

If you’re an Oklahoma fan, walking out of the Lloyd Noble Center on Monday night felt like watching a multi-million-dollar sports car drive straight off a cliff. Dropping a 68–64 game to East Texas A&M as a 28.5-point favorite isn't just an ugly box score—it’s an all-time blemish that will live on the Sooners' NET resume until Selection Sunday.

For the last 48 hours, the narrative in Norman and across the Oklahoma sports landscape has been entirely about panic, regression, and whether Porter Moser’s seat has officially reached flashpoint.

And yet, take a look at what the rest of the national media landscape thinks. Or, more specifically, take a look at what ESPN’s Jay Bilas thinks.

In the aftermath of the historic upset, Bilas dropped his latest edition of The Bilas Index: The best men's basketball teams in 2026-27 on ESPN.com. Rather than burying the Sooners outside the top 65 or tossing them into the wastebin alongside other bottom-tier mid-major shockers, Bilas slotted Oklahoma at No. 42 overall.

To put that in perspective, a team that just lost to a KenPom sub-200 program picked last in the Southland Conference is still viewed by one of the sharpest minds in college basketball as a top-45 team in America.

How is that possible? Bilas explained the logic directly in his index, acknowledging the sheer absurdity of Monday night while pointing to the macro reality of what this roster actually is once fully healthy.

"OU didn't expect to make the wrong kind of history on opening night -- its four-point loss to East Texas A&M, per ESPN Research, was the second-largest upset in the past 30 years by point spread (28.5)."

It’s impossible to gloss over that. ESPN Research tracking confirmed what we all felt: only Eastern Illinois (+30.5 over Iowa in 2022) has pulled off a bigger point-spread shocker over the last three decades. The 15 missed free throws, the 15 turnovers, and the complete lack of execution without a hobbled Xzayvier Brown on the floor are things you can't just wave away with a magic wand.

At the same time, Bilas argues that looking at a single 40-minute disaster completely misses the foundation Porter Moser built this roster on. As he notes:

"But this is a roster with experience (five players who have played at least 100 games), headed by a coach, Porter Moser, who has won at least 20 games the past three seasons. The talent is there."

Therein lies the ultimate paradox of this Oklahoma team right now.

On paper, Bilas is entirely right. This roster has legitimate pieces. Pop Isaacs dropped 15 points in his debut, Derrion Reid posted a gritty 14-and-10 double-double, and once Brown and Tae Davis are fully locked into the rotation alongside veteran pieces like Duke Brennan, the ceiling of this group is vastly higher than what we saw on opening night. Moser has rattled off three consecutive 20-win seasons in Norman, and the sheer volume of 100-game college veterans in this locker room means they should know how to bounce back.

The disconnect, of course, is that fan bases don't live in macro analytical models—they live in the immediate gut-punch of reality. When you have a $15M to $17.5M roster investment and a program facing an absolute postseason mandate, you don't get style points for "projected talent" when you're trailing East Texas A&M by 16 points in the second half.

Bilas keeping OU at No. 42 proves that the national analytical community still respects the sheer ingredients on this roster. But the grace period is officially over. If the Sooners want to prove that Monday night was just an apocalyptic outlier—and validate why guys like Bilas are still keeping them in the top 50—they have to clean up the charity stripe, take care of the basketball, and start stacking wins immediately before a brutal November and December gauntlet exposes them for good.