NCAA Basketball oklahoma Sooners

Could the NBA and its minimum age requirement really be guilty of hypocrisy?

It certainly appears that way to Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel and some other Big 12 coaches after watching the most recent NBA Finals and seeing which NBA players were pushed as the faces of the league throughout the season.

The straight out of high school players, who are the type of players the NBA no longer wants to be associated with, are now carrying the torch for the world's best pro game.

"If you follow the NBA, if you look at the guys who are promoted as the face of the NBA, you are talking about Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Dwight Howard, Kevin Garnett," Capel said. "Those are four that jumped right out and none of those guys attended college and I don't think it hurt them."

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The debate about which conference is the best basketball league usually heats up in December.

But the Big 12 coaches set fire to the debate early by staking claim as the best basketball conference Tuesday, some five months before the 2009-10 season begins. So the Big East, ACC, Pac-10 and SEC will have to just lineup for second best.

"I do think it's going to be the best with what we have retuning and the things that we've done in the last few years," Texas A&M coach Mark Turgeon said during the Big 12 summer teleconference call Tuesday. "I've talked to some so-called experts out there and they think we are going to be the best league, too.

Don't look now, but Sunday's sudden dismissal of 6-foot-6 rising senior forward Juan Pattillo has made the Oklahoma Sooners frontline for next season much younger and far more inexperienced.

The Sooners were already coming into the 2009-10 season with major questions marks in their frontcourt with the departure of All-American Blake Griffin and his brother Taylor Griffin to the NBA. But things became more uncertain with the removal of the athletic Pattillo from the equation.

Head coach Jeff Capel announced Sunday that Pattillo had been removed from the squad for violation of team rules. The speculation in Oklahoma is that the former junior college transfer was jettisoned because of academic issues. Capel declined to comment further.

It's incredible to still be saying this March 4, but before Wednesday night's game against Missouri the Oklahoma Sooners hadn't been faced with a real road test while at full strength all season. They didn't play any potential NCAA Tournament teams on the road in non-conference play, and Blake Griffin was injured in the first half of their game in Austin.

That finally changed when they went into Columbia, and while they didn't embarrass themseleves, the Sooners sure didn't have the look of a national title contender in their 73-64 loss to Mizzou.

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Blake Griffin has missed his team's last two games due to a concussion suffered against Texas, both of which were Oklahoma losses.

Needless to say, he's the most important part of one of the better teams in the nation.

Fortunately for the Sooners, Griffin has been cleared to play again, and will likely return against the Texas Tech Red Raiders on Saturday.

It's a win some, lose some kind of day for Oklahoma. On the downside, the Sooners suspended forward Juan Pattillo for Saturday's game against Texas Tech, further weakening an already depleted frontcourt.

But on the upside, that might be Oklahoma's temporarily depleted frontcourt.

While the Sooners were announcing news of Pattillo's suspension for violating an unspecified team rule, according to the Oklahoman, player of the year candidate Blake Griffin was doing something he hadn't done in almost a week -- playing basketball.

Ranking the rankings criticizes the critics when the polls come out.

Headlining: Pittsburgh beat Connecticut to kick off the week, led by DeJuan Blair's ridiculous 22-point, 23-rebound effort. It seemed relatively unlikely at the time that the Panthers could manage to jump both North Carolina and Oklahoma, providing that either one of the two won out for the week.

But then Saturday rolled around. The Tar Heels fell to Maryland and Oklahoma, without Blake Griffin for most of the game, coughed one up to Texas.

The story wasn't going to be about Kansas winning. Seriously. The Jayhawks never had a chance of grabbing the headlines. Even with Bill Self's crew closing out an impressive Big 12 road win, ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla was still discussing the lack of impact this game would have on Oklahoma's NCAA tournament resume.

That's because Blake Griffin didn't play. And that's not to take away from Kansas' impressive 87- 78 win over the Sooners in Norman, Okla., but it would be completely unrealistic to think this is the same Oklahoma team with Griffin on the bench.

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Blake Griffin, arguably the best player in the country right now, will not play tonight when Oklahoma plays its first game after losing to Texas Saturday.

Griffin suffered a concussion and only played part of the game Saturday, but received a "clean" bill of health. Still, his status for tonight's game remained in question. Now it's official, he's out. Sooner head coach Jeff Capel has stated that there's no real timetable for Griffin's return, and frankly, that's a smart move.

An MRI taken of Blake Griffin's skull came out clear of any indication of a concussion, which is obviously good news for Griffin and the Sooners. While he is still not officially cleared to play in Monday night's game against Kansas, the likelihood increases that he will. The teams are tied at the top of the Big 12 conference.

Griffin took an inadvertent shot across the bridge of his nose in the first half of Saturday night's game at Texas. He only played a few more minutes before Oklahoma pulled him for the rest of the game. Without Griffin, the Sooners fell to a desperate Longhorn team.