Sitting courtside at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, Tennessee, it was hard to find any trace of 6-seed Texas A&M men’s basketball’s trademark up-tempo, high-powered offense in its showing in the Southeastern Conference Tournament. 

Sure, there were sparks: A quick 8-0 run here, back-to-back made shots there. But in head coach Bucky McMillan’s first SEC Tournament, the Aggies started off sluggish and never could recover in an 83-63 loss to 11-seed Oklahoma. It tied A&M’s lowest points scored this season.

“There’s a lot of these guys that have not played in the NCAA Tournament,” McMillan said. “Some of these guys haven’t played an SEC tournament. You know, there was a time when they never played at Reed Arena, and we weren’t very good there. So I felt this was the first kind of feeling of a tournament game. I think we’ll be much better in the next one.”

All in all, the first half against Oklahoma was quite possibly the worst half of basketball A&M had played all season, as they entered the halftime break down 49-27.

Not only did the Aggies only shoot 29%, but their trademark Bucky Ball defensive press wasn’t able to produce results either. The Sooners shot 59% in the first half and gave up just four turnovers, same as the Maroon and White. 

“We knew A&M was gonna press the whole game,” Oklahoma head coach Porter Moser said. “We had seven turnovers. We had 16 assists. … So we did a lot of things we needed to do to win, and that’s all we talked about today.”

Things started off poorly for the Aggies and blazing hot for the Sooners. By the second media timeout, Oklahoma held a 25-11 lead while redshirt senior guard Nijel Pack had 11 points all on his own, thanks to an early 3-for-3 stretch from 3-point range.

Pack was a large contributor to Oklahoma’s early lead and led the way for the Sooners with 20 points. 

All of that came before Pack took a hard blow to the face with 5:46 remaining in the game, an incident ruled a flagrant foul on graduate student G Marcus Hill for head-to-head contact. 

“We knew they were going to press a lot, and, you know, we were taking it to our advantage,” Pack said. “We were able to break the press, and we were just playing freely.”

When McMillan called timeout with 8:12 remaining with Oklahoma on a 15-3 run, A&M trailed by 18, down 32-14. That run extended to as much as 21-3 before graduate student forward Rashaun Agee was able to break the streak at the free-throw line with just over four and a half minutes left in the first half. 

As part of that streak, the Maroon and White went over six minutes without a made field goal before junior G Pop Isaacs broke the streak with a made 3-pointer with just over two minutes remaining in the half.

HALF: Oklahoma 49, Texas A&M 27.

Nothing clicking for the Aggies in that first half. They shot just 29% from the field, to the Sooner’s 69%

Lot of discouraged Aggie fans in Bridgestone Arena at the moment. pic.twitter.com/995oF1cFyn

— Ian Curtis (@Texiancurtis) March 13, 2026

That’s not to say that the Aggies were done fighting. Powered by back-to-back 3-pointers from Isaacs and a monster jam by fifth year F Ali Dibba, A&M put together a 10-0 run to cut the deficit down to just 12 points. 

But just as soon as A&M got hot, it seemed to cool off. Oklahoma went on an 8-0 run of its own after the under-12 media timeout, growing the gap to 20 points.

The difference was momentum plays, Isaacs said.

“We just started playing like ourselves to come out, come out of halftime,” Isaacs said. “First four minutes, got some open looks, knocked them down. … [senior F] Tae Davis hit that three in the corner. Kind of slowed the momentum down. They got some more stops and some more baskets, and that’s kind of what ended it right there.”

The other biggest difference was on the boards. The Sooners held the overall rebounding advantage, 48-33, and had 18 second-chance points while the Aggies had just one.

“That was a huge part,” Moser said. “We knew we had to hit the glass and to have that many offensive rebounds. That’s what got us going. You know? It [was] actually that run when A&M came out the second half ready to go, and we got back into it with some offensive rebound, put backs.”

Even still, Agee says that the Maroon and White still feel confident heading into Selection Sunday.

“We have always figured it out,” Agee said. “We lost games early on in the season. Won the Auburn game, lost to Tennessee, I believe it was, and then came back and beat somebody else. … So, I mean, we went through some games in our season where we understand, you know, it’s tournament time, and we’ll figure it out like we always do.”