East Texas A&M stuns Oklahoma 68-64 in one of college basketball's biggest upsets

Oklahoma's season could hardly have started worse. The Sooners fell 68-64 at home to East Texas A&M on Monday night, a season-opening defeat that ranks among the largest upsets in modern college basketball history and immediately turned up the heat on head coach Porter Moser.

The Lions, a program based in Commerce, Texas, roughly 66 miles northeast of Dallas, arrived as 28.5-point underdogs. Per ESPN Research, the result stands as the second-biggest upset from a spread standpoint in the last 30 years, and a wager on East Texas A&M to win outright would have returned just over 58-to-1. It was the school's first victory over a high-major opponent, delivered by a team picked to finish last in the Southland Conference preseason poll.

Oklahoma did much of the damage to itself at the free throw line, going 17-for-32 and missing 15 attempts. Derrion Reid and BJ Edwards, who each shot better than 76 percent on free throws last season, combined to make only 6 of 15.

Chants calling for Moser's firing broke out during the game, and afterward the coach apologized to the fanbase. "I apologize to every single person that came in," Moser said. "The things you do in a game like this in basketball that gets you beat, we did."

Moser has reached the NCAA Tournament only once in his first five seasons at Oklahoma, though his teams had largely avoided disastrous losses and stayed on the doorstep of at-large bids. He entered Monday with a 31-0 record in Quad 4 games with the Sooners. That mark is now 31-1.

The Sooners played without star point guard Xzayvier Brown, regarded as one of the top 20 floor generals in the sport, who sat out with a leg injury. Moser refused to lean on the absence as an explanation. "Shouldn't turn it over 15 times," he said. "I don't care who's out, who's in, who hasn't played."

The loss was no fluke. East Texas A&M controlled long stretches of the game and led by 16 points in the second half. Bo Aldridge, a transfer from Hutchinson Community College, was the best guard on the floor, finishing with a game-high 22 points and five assists. French freshman forward Mohamed Diakite added 15 points, seven rebounds, two assists and three steals, punctuating the night with the game-sealing poster dunk for coach Jaret Von Rosenberg's squad.

The metrics paint a bleak picture of the fallout. Wins Above Bubble, the resume measure used by the NCAA Tournament selection committee, gave an average bubble team a 98 percent chance to beat the Lions. The defeat dropped Oklahoma to negative 0.98 WAB, and even a win Friday over Mississippi Valley State, a team the Sooners have a 99 percent chance to beat, would nudge that figure only to negative 0.97. Power-conference teams otherwise went 53-1 against mid-major and low-major opponents on Monday, leaving Oklahoma as the lone loser.

"There's no running away from this loss," Moser said. The reverberations from Monday night, he acknowledged, could follow the Sooners all the way to Selection Sunday.