Setting the table
Meet Jordan Woodard, the new face of Oklahoma basketball
On Nov. 22, 2013, the Oklahoma men’s basketball team played Seton Hall. The game was part of the Coaches vs. Cancer Classic, held in the sparkling, new Brooklyn Nets arena, the Barclays Center. It was the Sooners first game of the tournament and they were favored.
A pair of Seton Hall free throws with just under four minutes left in the game put the Pirates up by eight. With a minute left to play, the Sooners still trailed by seven but some crucial forced turnovers and timely buckets put Oklahoma in a chance to tie the game late.
The Sooners’ starting point guard at the time, a freshman named Jordan Woodard, stepped to the free throw line with 27 seconds left, his team trailing 85–83. Woodard made the first, but missed the second attempt. Cameron Clark, an Oklahoma guard at the time, grabbed the offensive rebound and hoisted up a jumper with just 17 seconds left on the clock. It clanged off the rim but the 6-foot-nothing Woodard was there for another offensive rebound and kicked it to an awaiting Buddy Hield. Hield drew a Seton Hall foul and the Sooners went back to the free throw line needing just one point to complete the comeback.
Hield drained both free throws and the Sooners beat the Pirates by one point.
That game, that surprise comeback win, is one of Woodard’s favorite memories as a Sooner. Woodard wasn’t a star in that game, he wasn’t an offensive focal point and he didn’t even take the game-clinching shots, but that win still means a little bit more to Woodard than most.
He could have said his favorite Oklahoma memory was getting interviewed by Craig Sager after that game — something every basketball player has dreamed of at one point. He could have described cutting down the nets last season after he had helped his team secure a spot in the NCAA Final Four. He could have reminisced over the game on Christmas day last year when he scored a career-high 28 points. But that’s not who Woodard is.
Remembering a hard-fought, team effort of a victory above everything else, now that captures the essence of Jordan Woodard: a supremely unselfish player and a team leader. As he enters into his senior season, expected to take the reins of an offense looking to replace all 25 of Hield’s points from a season ago, Woodard might shoot a bit more than usual, but he won’t be changing who he is.
Jordan Woodard grew up in Arcadia, Oklahoma, a one-square mile town with a population just under 300 people; an atmosphere almost as quiet as Woodard himself. He attended Edmond Memorial High School where he starred on a basketball squad with his brother James. The team was small, and slept on.
“(We had) a lot of D1 talent that went overlooked,” Woodard said of his Memorial teams. “We had a small team and we had to play as underdogs every game even though we might have been ranked pretty high while me and my brother were there. We were at a disadvantage every game but we had good coaching.”
Woodard scored for that Bulldogs team, but he also played the role of set-up man. He helped lead Memorial to three state championships and two state titles. Woodard even received an all-state selection his senior season, but he was more concerned with losing in the championship game his junior campaign.
“I got to win a couple state championships which was great, I can’t take that for granted,” he said. “But just losing one, I still use that as motivation to this day because it could have been three of them.
That feeling of being overlooked, that sense that Woodard was always one step behind the country’s other prospects; he carried that and still carries that to this day.
“Yeah, you could say (he has a chip on his shoulder), I always feel like I’m overlooked maybe just because of my size or just in Oklahoma in general we don’t get a lot of publicity,” Woodard said. “That’s really why I decided to stay at OU, stay local so we could really get that exposure in Oklahoma because we get overlooked so often.”
For the last five seasons, Chris Crutchfield has been an assistant coach on the Sooners staff and head coach Lon Kruger’s right hand man. Crutch (as the team refers to him) has become one of Oklahoma’s top recruiters. He helped land Woodard.
“We established a great relationship early on,” Woodard said. “I kind of went back and forth a little bit between me wanting to play with my brother and him wanting me to come here and run the show from the jump.”
Woodard said that Crutchfield helped him initially find himself in the Sooners offense. Whenever he needed something, Woodard knew that he could go to Crutch for help. He also knew he had a strong relationship with Kruger.
“One of the reasons I decided to come to OU was because the coaching is very similar from my high school to how Coach Kruger runs his program so it made that transition easier, just playing for a point guard coach,” Woodard said.
One of the things that cemented Woodard’s decision to come to Oklahoma was something that happened in the dog days of 2011. The summer before Kruger took over the head coaching position at Oklahoma, he invited Woodard to have dinner.
“When they first got to campus he invited me up, me and my family, and we talked within that first week of him getting here. I don’t know if he had even moved into his house or anything but we met up in the gym, he talked to me and he gave me his plan for what he wanted from me,” Woodard said. “I mean, other colleges did that as well but that was my sophomore year and as I got into my junior year and my senior year I had a small phase where I was fighting injury and Coach stayed in touch with me and he still wanted that relationship to be strong so that meant a lot to me.”
Woodard started from Day One at Oklahoma. As a freshman, he was one start away from tying a school record…
“So if we would have won two more games…” he interrupted. He didn’t know that. Woodard thought back to that final game of his freshman season: an 80–75 overtime defeat to a North Dakota State team that wasn’t supposed to win the game. He started to lament over what could have been but then he stopped himself.
“We had a pretty good season and we lost to a team that we weren’t supposed to lose to,” he said. “That made it even more important for me to just want to keep getting better and keep getting better because I feel like we lost that game because of inexperience.”
Woodard said his biggest obstacle his first season was finding the right time to hunt for his shots. Like most point guards transitioning from one level of play to the next, he didn’t want to come in and upset any balance or system the guys above him had.
“It was tough for me to just find my shots; like, I’ve always been good at wanting to pass the ball, I wanted to come here and be a pass first guard, but just having the confidence to step up and knock down shots… It was different from high school because in high school you’re expected to score, you’re expected to do a lot of good things and then coming here to college you just want to please the guys ahead of you,” he said. “I had a couple seniors I was playing with, and then Buddy and Isaiah turned into who they are now, so just wanting them to do well kind of takes away from your aggression a little bit being a freshman.”
You might look at Woodard on the court and think the lack of a starring role bothers him, when most players are yelling or grinning from ear to ear, Woodard is calm, sometimes even showing that patented Kobe Bryant scowl.
“At that size (6-foot), he needs to be of that mind and mentality,” Kruger told Ryan Aber of The Oklahoman earlier this year. “Everyone’s got their unique personality of course. And you’ve got to play to your personality.”
Last season, Oklahoma took a trip to Houston to participate in the school’s first Final Four in nearly a decade. Woodard was a part of that team, but he wasn’t the star. That honor belonged to the aforementioned Buddy Hield. Woodard didn’t mind one bit. He watched Hield work from his sophomore year through his final season, all the hours in the gym and all the shots Hield would get up, and he knew that Hield had earned it.
“It’s crazy because I still look back at the numbers that he had from last season, but while you’re playing with him it’s hard to really see it as exciting as it may seem to the world because you see him do it every day,” Woodard said. “You see him make crazy shots every day.”
He took the advantage of playing with Hield as an opportunity to learn and grow as a player. He tried to beat Hield into the gym on occasion — something he said former guard Isaiah Cousins did more often than most — and he tried to adopt that “go the extra mile” approach that Hield embraced.
“It was all crazy. It was all crazy. From last year’s run specifically, I can’t just take out one memory,” he said.
That season, Woodard accepted an off-the-ball role, surrendering the “point guard” title to Cousins. As a result, he shot the highest percentages from the floor of his career.
He still led the team in assists.
Fast forward to this season, Woodard’s senior campaign, and a change is coming.
“We still need more from Jordan Woodard,” Crutchfield said with this sense of steadfastness in his voice. He said he expects Jordan to be one of the team’s leaders but that they are going to need him to be more. More than he was his freshman season, more than he has been since. Kruger echoed that sentiment.
“Jordan, certainly, at the point guard spot needs to assert himself more and he understands that,” Kruger said. “He should be. I mean, he’s the retuning leading scorer so… He had a terrific junior season and now returning without that supporting cast around him he needs to be the guy that steps out there and leads us and is an aggressive scorer.”
The big question is whether Woodard can consistently be that last part, an aggressive scorer.
“Depends on the situation,” he said; you could see the wheels turning in his head. “The tables have kind of turned and Coach wants me to be more aggressive but I still have that mentality that I had as a freshman of wanting to get guys involved and wanting to get them shots.”
Kruger said Woodard will slide back to the point guard position full-time this season, and with that he’s going to see a lot more attention from opposing defenses. Woodard isn’t worried.
With a point guard on the floor whose primary focus is setting the table for his teammates, Woodard knows he has the ability to breed confidence, confidence that those other guys are going to see the ball and continue to see it even after misses.
“That’s what I’m all about, making sure everyone is playing with high confidence and I think this year is going to be important for me to just exude that confidence and let them see that and just keep giving them the ball,” he said. “We’re going to have guys stepping into new roles and they might start off a little slow hitting shots — we all might — but it’s going to be a learning process, a learning curve, and I just want to do my part being that leader and making sure everybody’s confidence is intact.”
“Definitely looking forward to (being that go-to scorer),” Woodard said. “I just gotta show how much work it is to take those steps necessary to be a great player… Coach always preaches to me, you know, the better I can play and make sure guys are comfortable, the better we are as a team. I understand the importance of how it’s going to start with me, on both ends of the floor, and I’m gonna make it a consistent habit to improve every day and just go all out.”
