Cowgirls Sewing The Seed

Originally Published: Jan 13, 2010 7:36 AM CDT

Happy Birthday to our Oklahoma Sports editor extraordinaire Gene Rickman.  He’s old enough to remember when Montreal and Pittsburgh had actual major league baseball teams and Eddie Murphy could make a funny movie without dressing up as a woman or voicing over a cartoon talking donkey.

Is there a player in college basketball, male or female, who means more to their team than OSU’s Andrea Riley?  She scored 43 points in a huge win over Baylor Saturday.  Riley followed that by scoring 30 points and handing out the game-winning assist to Del City freshman Toni Young in a win at Kansas.

The Cowgirls were picked 9^th in the Big 12 preseason poll.  In two conference games, they have beaten the teams picked 1^st (Baylor) and 2^nd (Kansas) in that same poll.

OSU is in the NCAA tournament and now playing for seeding which is hugely important.  Bear in mind that Riley must sit out the Cowgirls’ next NCAA tournament game as NCAA punishment for a run-in with an LSU player during an NCAA tournament game two seasons ago.

The more games the Cowgirls win, the better their tournament seed will be and the weaker, in all likelihood, their first-round NCAA foe will be.  Who says the NCAA tournament makes regular season games less important?  In the Cowgirls’ case, it’s just the opposite.