Lon Kruger didn't play by the book in rebuilding Oklahoma

— -- Picture a football school where the new head basketball coach is told his top priority has to be getting the students interested in hoops again. That is the situation that Oklahoma found itself in when Lon Kruger took the job in 2011.

Kruger is now in his fifth season in Norman, Oklahoma, and there's a case to be made that the OU basketball program has been on an upward trajectory ever since his arrival. That being said, the program's ascendance certainly hasn't been without its own surprises and twists.

In particular, Kruger has brought Oklahoma to the threshold of a No. 1 seed by doing two things that go against "the book" of college basketball's accepted wisdom. First, OU has largely opted out of (or failed to succeed in) the pursuit of the nation's top-ranked recruits. And, the Sooners' success in 2015-16 has been built overwhelmingly on just one facet of the game, the 3-point shot.

Recruiting worked extraordinarily well at Oklahoma, until it stopped working

Under previous head coach Jeff Capel, OU signed top-30 recruits Tiny Gallon, Willie Warren, Tommy Mason-Griffin and, of course, Blake Griffin. Although Capel was gone after just five seasons at the helm in Norman, for a time his talent-driven approach paid real dividends.

Powered by Griffin's Wooden Award-winning sophomore season, Oklahoma entered the 2009 NCAA tournament as a No. 2 seed and sporting a 27-5 record. Winning every tournament game by at least 10 points, the Sooners beat Morgan State, Michigan and Syracuse and cruised into the Elite Eight. Alas, the committee put OU in the same region as eventual national champion North Carolina, and the 82-70 loss to the Tar Heels was the final game of Griffin's college career.

At the time it appeared Oklahoma would translate tournament run into lasting momentum for the program. For 2009-10, Capel brought in what to this day is easily the highest ranked recruiting class the Sooners have signed in the, quote-unquote, modern era, and OU was ranked in the preseason Top 25 that fall. From that point on, however, nothing went right for Oklahoma.

Warren was tapped by some writers as the preseason national player of the year, but an ankle injury sidelined him for eight games and the Sooners struggled to make shots even when their star was healthy. After a 4-12 finish in the Big 12, a number of OU players chose to transfer when the NCAA announced in the offseason it was investigating Gallon for having allegedly received impermissible benefits. Capel hung on for one more season in Norman before returning to Duke in 2011 as an assistant to Mike Krzyzewski.

Kruger has built a national title contender without nationally elite recruiting

The Sooners were coming off a 14-18 season when Kruger arrived in 2011, but he achieved at least one victory -- albeit a little-noticed one -- right away. The new head coach persuaded the core of the team he inherited to stay with him for the 2011-12 season. Although OU didn't accomplish much in Kruger's first campaign (posting a 15-16 record, with a 5-13 mark in Big 12 play), the continuity in talent allowed the head coach and his staff to get their arms around the problem, so to speak.

By the time Oklahoma embarked on its 2012-13 season, Kruger and his staff (including assistants Lew Hill and Steve Henson, who came with the coach from UNLV) knew what they needed in terms of personnel. Among the freshmen who arrived in Norman that fall were Isaiah Cousins, as well as a lightly recruited wing from the Bahamas by way of Wichita named Buddy Hield. In Kruger's second season, the Sooners went 11-7 in the Big 12 and returned to the NCAA tournament as a No. 10 seed, falling to San Diego State in the round of 64.

When Ryan Spangler transferred to Oklahoma from Gonzaga for Kruger's third season, the sophomore big man was joined by freshman guard Jordan Woodard. With Hield, Cousins, Woodard and Spangler, the Sooners finally had the nucleus they would ride for the next three seasons. None of those four players were consensus top-100 recruits coming out of high school, and indeed over the past five seasons Oklahoma's recruiting success -- at least as conventionally measured -- has ranked behind not only Kansas but also Texas, Baylor and Oklahoma State in the Big 12.

None of which matters much, naturally, when Hield is the odds-on favorite to earn national POY honors, and your team is 20-3. Granted, we've seen great and even dominant college players come from outside the top 100 before. (Victor Oladipo and Doug McDermott come to mind.) But what we haven't witnessed in a long time is a consensus national championship contender comprised entirely of such players. In this respect Kruger and Oklahoma have blazed their own path.

Nothing about Oklahoma's performance has improved since last season -- except one spectacular thing

Another striking feature of the Sooners' success in 2015-16 has been how similar the team is to the OU unit we saw in 2014-15. In fact, the statistical sameness across the board is uncanny.

Just to cite a few examples from Big 12 play, Oklahoma's 2-point shooting is within half a percentage point of what it was a year ago, its turnover rate has remained virtually identical season-to-season and to the extent that there have been changes on defense the movement has actually been in the wrong direction. The Sooners had the No. 1 defense in Big 12 play last season, but so far in 2015-16 Kruger's guys rank No. 4 on that side of the ball, behind West Virginia, Texas and Kansas.

If everything's the same as or worse than it was last season, how has Oklahoma been so good? Give Kruger credit. Not only did he see something in Hield coming out of high school, the head coach has adjusted his offense in 2015-16 to accommodate this team's ability to knock down 3-pointers. This season in conference play OU has devoted 43 percent of its shot attempts to tries from beyond the arc, far more than any other team in the league. And with Hield, Woodard and Cousins all hitting at least 47 percent of their 3s, the new perimeter emphasis has almost single-handedly propelled Oklahoma's success.

The one concession Oklahoma has made to the conventional wisdom is valuing experience. When Kruger settles on a starting five he tends to stick with it, and the group he has now (Hield, Cousins, Woodard, Spangler and Khadeem Lattin) has collectively made 414 career starts. The result is a veteran team comprised of onetime unheralded recruits who are burying opponents with made 3s. The Sooners aren't doing things by the book, but Kruger may be authoring a whole new chapter on how to win a title.