Mike Boynton: "I Wish We Valued Winning More"

STILLWATER – We’re less than a week away from Oklahoma State’s first opening round game in the NCAA tournament in four years. It’s been a wild couple of years under Mike Boynton, with everything from FBI investigations to holding walk-on tryouts to form a practice squad to knocking off to beating five top-10 teams and seven top-20 teams since the first week of Feb. 2021.

“This is obviously a really huge step in our program, certainly under my time here as head coach” said Mike Boynton. “I’m excited to have this group playing in this tournament, for a myriad of reasons. It started from March 24, 2017 when there’s a lot of questions about me being the head coach here, to having to recruit this group not once, but twice and not knowing for a long time whether [playing in the tournament] was a realistic possibility. But we told the kids we’d fight for them – we did that – then they fought for us and they put themselves in a position to be playing really good basketball this time of year and I’m excited that we get to continue.”

The Pokes get to continue as they were tabbed a No. 4 seed, which is a solid seeding based on four years of not making the Big Dance. However, it’s a seeding that’s puzzled quite a few people considering West Virginia, a team the Pokes beat twice in the past two weeks was given a three seed.

Also because both Joe Lunardi and Jerry Palm had the Pokes tabbed as no lower than a 3 seed.

“The only thing I’ll say is I wish we valued winning more,” said coach Boynton. “I obviously say that with a slant to our team because to have the second-most quad-1 wins – we just introduced this as a major [ranking] factor – we have the second-most quad-1 wins, we played in the best league in the country, five of our seven losses are to teams in the tournament, we have 13 wins versus teams in the tournament, we won 12 games in that hardest league in the country and the gauntlet that we went through, and again that wasn’t anybody’s fault, we had the most challenging draw to finish the season that anybody could have. I don’t know how you look at that, and that’s why I think we should’ve at least been 3 (seed). I think we were closer to a 2 (seed) than a 4 (seed), but from the seeding list, we were closer to a 5 (seed) than a 3 (seed).”

As it is, the Cowboys have a rather solid match-up with a tough Liberty team this coming Friday. The Flames, led by head coach Ritchie McKay, is sitting at 23-5 on the season and is currently riding a 12-game winning streak that dates back to the middle of January. They’re fresh off winning the ASUN Tournament and are led by guard Darius McGhee, who was named the ASUN Player of the Year as he averaged 15.6 points, 4.4 rebounds and 2.1 assists per game.

“They’ve got a really good team; they may be the best 13 seed in the event,” said coach Boynton. “They’re really well coached; they have a disciplined style of basketball that they play. They have players who have not only played in this event, and we don’t, but they’ve got guys who’ve won in this event. That experience is certainly something to take into consideration as we prepare. They’ve also played really good competition in their non-conference to get themselves in position in case they had some stumbles in league play. They beat South Carolina this year, they played TCU very closely, they played in this event a couple of years ago and beat Mississippi State. So, I have the utmost respect for their program, and I know we’re going to have to really focus on having a good game plan and preparing well to give ourselves a chance to move on.”

Tipoff is scheduled for 5:25 p.m. CT on Friday, March 19 and will be televised on TBS.