The College Basketball Crown ends Sunday in Las Vegas with Oklahoma and West Virginia playing for the title. Neither team treated this tournament like an afterthought, which is part of why the final works.
Oklahoma beat Colorado 90-86 in overtime, before toppling Baylor to get here. West Virginia defeated Stanford 82-77 in overtime and then rolled through Creighton. Both teams come in with momentum but offer contrasting styles. The Sooners rank 20th in the nation in offensive efficiency, per KenPom, while the Mountaineers are 18th defensively.
There’s more than pride on the line in the second-ever Crown championship, too. The winner takes home an NIL package worth $300K, and the runner-up gets $100K.
How to watch Oklahoma vs. West Virginia in the College Basketball Crown championship
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Oklahoma’s season had enough mood swings for two teams. The Sooners opened 11-3, then lost nine straight in SEC play before finding themselves again late. By the time Selection Sunday arrived, Porter Moser was arguing that his team had played some of the best basketball in the country down the stretch, and his case was not ridiculous: Oklahoma had won six of its last seven and eight of its last 11 against SEC teams before the Crown began.
The semifinal win over Baylor pushed that run even further. That game looked like the sharper version of Oklahoma. The Sooners shot 50 percent to Baylor’s 39, turned giveaways into a 21-2 edge in points off turnovers and got 21 points from Xzayvier Brown. That is usually a clean way to make a game look calmer than it actually was.
West Virginia’s season had a different shape. This is Ross Hodge’s first year in Morgantown, and his team was picked to finish 11th in the Big 12 preseason poll. Instead, WVU claimed seventh place and extended its season in Las Vegas.
That matters because the Mountaineers did not stumble into this final. They built a respectable year after a coaching change, then kept going. The Stanford comeback, from eight down with less than three minutes left in regulation, is probably the clearest version of what this run has looked like.
The Creighton semifinal was less dramatic and more convincing. Freshman DJ Thomas scored 20, while West Virginia put five players in double figures and won the rebounding battle 39-29. It was the kind of game that makes a one-off postseason tournament stop looking random and start looking like a team that actually has some use for one more trophy.
There is some real familiarity here. The schools spent years together in the Big 12, and Oklahoma leads the all-time series 17-10. The most recent meeting came on Jan. 17, 2024, when the Sooners beat West Virginia 77-63 in Norman. That does not decide anything Sunday, but it keeps this from feeling like two teams pulled from separate planets.
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