HOUSTON — Jay Wright doesn’t mind that the first Oklahoma game was a 23-point loss.
The way he looks at it, if Villanova was facing a team in the Final Four that it hadn’t played yet or had already defeated, the Wildcats might not take the challenge quite as seriously as this one.
But Oklahoma demolished them.
On Dec. 7, Oklahoma handed Villanova its worst loss of the last two years. In the eighth game of the season, the Sooners beat the Wildcats, 78-55, in the Pearl Harbor Classic in Hawaii.
“Our guys have great respect for them,” Wright said. “One of the things that’s challenging in getting to this point, you’ve won four big-time games usually, and you’re feeling pretty good about yourself.
“Then you spend a week with everyone telling you how great you are and you think you’re going to beat whoever you play. But they’re going to play a team that waxed us.”
Villanova made just four of 32 three-pointers against Oklahoma and suffered its worst loss since a 28-point defeat to Creighton — 96-68 — at the Wells Fargo Center on Jan. 20, 2014.
The Wildcats haven’t forgotten.
“They’re not stupid,” Wright said. “They’re smart guys. I think it’s going to help us eliminate the distractions and really focus, because they know how good they are. If we hadn’t played them before, everybody would be saying, ‘Buddy Hield, Buddy Hield,’ but they got waxed by (Isaiah) Cousins and (Jordan) Woodard and they know it. So we really don’t have to tell them about them at all.”
Hield, the second-leading scorer in Division I, shot just 6 for 17 overall and 4 for 9 from three against Villanova and finished with 18 points — nearly eight below his average.
Cousins led the Sooners with 19 points and Woodard added 10 points.
“I feel like we’re a better team, but they got better too,” Villanova freshman forward Mikal Bridges said. “When that game ended, we learned what we have to do, and we learned that we didn’t want that to happen again, getting blown out like that.
“It was just a big learning experience, and since then we’ve just been learning every day and we just have to make sure we stick to what we do.”
The Wildcats lost to Virginia 12 days later, but they’re 25-3 since, with one loss in overtime, one by two points and one by seven points.
Safe to say Oklahoma was Villanova's worst game this year. By far.
“We definitely learned from that game,” Villanova junior Josh Hart said. “We know this is a different team offensively and defensively than we were back then. We’re way more in tune to our core values. …
“Watching it, you can just see the mistakes we made, not playing their personnel right or the bad shots we took. Definitely lots of bad decisions. Might be worse (watching it now) because we see everything wrong that we did. Definitely worse on tape.
“We’re going to watch it. Hopefully we don’t have to watch too much of it.”
It shows you how much things have changed that Villanova is favored by two points over a team it lost to by 22 points 3½ months ago.
Oklahoma was 19-2 in early February but then went 6-5 in its next 11 games coming into the NCAA Tournament.
How much does the first game play into Oklahoma's view of Villanova?
“Very little carry over,” Oklahoma coach Lon Kruger said. “They're playing great. They're playing with tremendous confidence. They're shooting the ball well. They're playing with a swagger. Jay has done a fantastic job with them. Our guys know that. They've watched Villanova all year long, how much success they've had, how well they played.
“The first game, being familiar with each other from a personnel standpoint, very little carryover. They're doing things differently. We're doing things differently. It's almost like we played them last year. It doesn't really relate to this game at all.”
Tipoff Saturday at the NRG Center, home of the Texans, is set for 6:09 p.m.
The winner plays for the national title on Monday against the winner of Saturday’s second semifinal between North Carolina and Syracuse.
“Hopefully we get a different result this time,” Ryan Arcidiacono said. “We know how good they are. They’ve improved a lot over the season, we think we’ve improved, and we’ll make it a battle and hopefully win.
“I’m not one to say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to get them back.’ But I think, clearly they got the best of us the first time we played and it would be awesome to get a win.
“But we just have to go down there playing our basketball and we know if we play our basketball the way we did in the Kansas game and the previous games in this tournament, I think it’s going to turn our way.”
Oklahoma, No. 7 in the final regular-season AP poll, advanced to the Final Four with wins by 14 over Cal Bakersfield (15 seed), by four over Virginia Commonwealth (10 seed), by 14 over No. 15 Texas A&M (3 seed) and by 12 over No. 5 Oregon (1 seed).
Villanova, No. 6 in the final poll, advanced with wins by 30 points over UNC Asheville (15 seed), by 19 over No. 25 Iowa (7 seed), by 23 over No. 10 Miami (3 seed) and by five over No. 1 Kansas (top seed in the tournament).
“They’re going to come out very tough and aggressive and we have to make sure we do the same thing,” Bridges said. “With the ability we have, we’re going to be a hard team to beat.”