The Forgotten Oklahoma Team That Nearly Broke College Basketball

This feature is part of VICE Sports' March Madness coverage.

On December 12, 1987, the University of Oklahoma men's basketball team defeated Centenary, a small college in Louisiana, by a score of 152-84. The Sooners forced 54 turnovers and had 33 steals, 12 of those—a new NCAA individual record—by slippery guard Mookie Blaylock, who would go on to become equally famous for his inextricable ties to the grunge era of rock and roll.

This margin of victory for Oklahoma was not entirely unprecedented—they would put up 150 points twice more that season—though it was at least somewhat unintentional, for as much as Sooners coach Billy Tubbs enjoyed exacting vengeance on teams for which he had cultivated contempt, Centenary was not one of those teams. The lone error Centenary made, according to Tubbs, was that "they decided to run with us," and one might make the case no one could run with that Oklahoma team, before or since.

"I have nothing to say," said Centenary coach Tommy Canterbury after that game. "The score speaks for itself."

The scores of that 1987-88 Oklahoma team as the season glided along—144-93 over Oral Roberts, 151-99 over Dayton, 134-84 over Colorado—do indeed tell a remarkable tale, one of a team whose accomplishments are often overlooked when the greatest teams in basketball history are discussed. With one more victory—with one more half of blistering basketball in the 1988 national championship game against Danny Manning and Kansas, a game that was tied at 50 at halftime before a second-half slowdown—it would likely be a different story. But that was the closest Tubbs' Sooners would ever come to the title, and so their legacy is often overshadowed by the tragic saga of Hank Gathers and Loyola Marymount, and the 40 Minutes of Hell triumphalism of Nolan Richardson's early-90s Arkansas Razorbacks.

But in terms of sheer raw power, that Oklahoma team was the college basketball equivalent of punk rock: They were loud and brash and untethered, and they didn't give a fuck what anyone thought about it. And nearly 30 years later, as Oklahoma prepares to play in only its second Final Four since 1988—and as the Sooners seek the first national basketball championship in school history—it is worth commemorating that 35-4 Oklahoma team as one of the most powerful forces in college basketball history. This was thanks in large part to their coach, the kind of guy who regularly threw down the gauntlet at his opponents.

"We used to say up front we were going to kick your ass," Tubbs told me a few years back, and that's the way Oklahoma played the game, repeatedly, from the time Tubbs took over in 1981 until he left for TCU in 1994. He was a Tulsa native, had worked as an assistant in Texas and as a head coach at Lamar, and his teams had always pushed the tempo. By 1987, he had built a roster that could go toe-to-toe with any team in the country. They had four starters—Blaylock, Ricky Grace, Harvey Grant, Dave Sieger—who could get after you from one end of the court to the other, and a big man in Stacey King who could protect the basket. All five starters averaged double figures, and by the end of the year the starters rarely left the court. They were quick and strong and could run all night, "and they loved to play like we wanted to play," Tubbs said. "It's hard to play like we played. That's why people don't play that way. It takes tremendous endurance."

They were cocky because Tubbs encouraged them to be cocky, because it fit the aesthetic of the moment. When they went up 25 on Virginia in an early-season tournament game in Hawaii, Tubbs told them, That's the ACC … kill em. Oklahoma won 109-61. They put up 107 on Auburn in the second round of the NCAA tournament, and 108 on Louisville in the Sweet Sixteen. They averaged 102.9 points per game over the course of the season, fewer only than Loyola Marymount that year, and they wound up with 486 steals over the course of a 39-game season. But whereas LMU's up-tempo philosophy occasionally felt in danger of veering into gimmickry—hey, come run around with us!—Oklahoma's was far more ruthless. The Sooners won 26 games by double digits that season; they won 12 games by at least 30 points, and five games by 50 points or more. They would shoot from anywhere largely because Tubbs was impatient, because he wanted to score immediately, because as Tubbs told me, "I'm a very conservative person, except on the basketball floor, and I'm a damn riverboat gambler on it."

Part of it, Tubbs knew, was about the show, particularly at a school like Oklahoma, where football has and always will take precedence: when Tubbs departed OU for TCU in 1994, he cited the difficulties of coaching basketball at a football school, though he's since repaired his relationship with the university. Part of it was stylistic, a mini-movement that took hold of college basketball for a short time during the tail end of a narcissistic decade in America and enabled the profundity and overwhelming shock-and-awe of teams like Oklahoma. Even after Kansas managed to control the tempo in the title game, the members of that Sooners team continue to consider it one of the greatest in college basketball history, and they're not alone: A Rivals.com list from back in 2007 named Oklahoma of the top 10 squads of the 64-team NCAA tournament era.

And why not? There may never be anything quite like that Oklahoma team again: While the 30-second shot clock and the rules changes in college basketball have allowed for a more fluid tempo, the highest-scoring team in Division I averaged 86.4 points per game this season. The press, employed strategically, is still a deadly weapon, as Virginia found out in the final minutes of its regional final game against Syracuse, but no one pushes the envelope like Tubbs once did.

The 2016 Oklahoma team is strikingly different from the '88 team. Unlike Tubbs, Lon Kruger is widely considered one of the nicest guys in the sport. And yet even if this year's Sooners do win it all, it could be argued that the greatest Oklahoma team of all was the one that rampaged through college basketball three decades earlier. If nothing else, the scores speak for themselves.