Oklahoma Basketball Trivia: Bet You Didn't Know This

Lon Kruger is Oklahoma’s 15th men’s basketball coach, and the fifth winningest after five -plus seasons.

Jan 16, 2016; Norman, OK, USA; Oklahoma Sooners head coach Lon Kruger discusses a call with an official during action against the West Virginia Mountaineers during the second half at Lloyd Noble Center. Mandatory Credit: Mark D. Smith-USA TODAY Sports

The former star player for Kansas State in the 1970s and head coach of his alma mater for six seasons in the late 1980s, had 111 wins at Oklahoma entering his sixth season as the Sooners’ head coach and a winning percentage of .661.

His eight wins so far this season give Kruger 119 total in his five and a half seasons on the OU bench. He is averaging 22.2 wins per season in his five previous season, and that places him third all-time on the Sooner coaches’ list based on the number of wins per season.

The winningest Oklahoma men’s basketball coach is Billy Tubbs, with 333 wins in 14 seasons, an average of almost 24 wins per season and an overall winning percentage of .716.

The winningest head coach to coach at Oklahoma, however, is Kruger, who lacks just three wins of reaching 600 wins for his career as a college head coach, which covers 30 seasons and six different college teams (Texas-Pan American, Kansas State, Florida, Illinois, UNLV and Oklahoma).

Kelvin Sampson, who was the Sooners’ head coach for 12 seasons (1994-2006), is second on the all-time win list at Oklahoma with 279 victories and an average of 23 wins per season.

Bruce Drake (1938-55) and Hugh McDermott (1921-38) had the longest coaching tenures at Oklahoma, each serving for 17 seasons. Drake won 200 games, only the third Oklahoma head basketball coach to reach that level, and led the Sooners to their first two Final Four performances (1938-39 and 1946-47). McDermott registered 185 wins in his 17 seasons at OU

The only other Oklahoma head coach in men’s basketball to win as many as 100 games was the legendary Bennie Owen, the second Sooner head coach in program history. Owen won a total of 113 games in 13 seasons. During that period (1908-1921), the teams did not play nearly as many games in a season as they do today.