It’s hard to win a championship.
There’s a reason why Coach K coached for 47 years and only got five. There’s a reason why Notre Dame hasn’t won a football title in 39 years or why Texas has won only one in the last 55 years. Hell, there’s a reason why UNC baseball is still trying to get to the mountain top despite playing in the MCWS Finals three times in the last 20 years. It’s hard to win a national championship.
That’s why it makes what Oklahoma just did even more special and far more impressive.
The Turnaround
It’s hard to explain just how incredible the turnaround for Oklahoma was this season. The Sooners got off to a great start winning the Shriner’s Children’s College Showdown in February. They finished that weekend 3-0 with a +26 run differential against Oklahoma State, TCU, and Texas Tech. That felt like the peak. They only won four series in SEC play. They lost their last four series of the season in a row, and then they got bounced in game one at Hoover by the No. 14 seed LSU Tigers.
To put it bluntly, they weren’t playing good enough baseball for anyone to think they were a threat to make it out of a regional. If it weren’t for their February and March resume, there was a case to be made to be left out all together. Then something clicked in Atlanta.
They went 11-2 in the postseason. They beat three Power Four conference champions to get to the MCWS. A team that hit just 48 home runs in their first 46 games hit 47 in their final 19 games. The lineup put up 9.1 runs per game in Omaha, and went 5-1 at Charles Schwab Field on their way to a title. They were an underdog in every game they played there and were a bettor’s dream.
There are only two other instances that come close to being comparable to this run from the Sooners over the last 20 years: Ole Miss in 2022 and Fresno State in 2008. Everything else pales in comparison to just how magical “Sooner Magic” truly was this June.
SEC’s Dominance
The questions about the SEC’s dominance in football are warranted after missing the national title game in three straight seasons. The low hanging fruit jokes were always going to be made for basketball when they had the most teams in the tournament of any conference but failed to cut down the nets. Oklahoma’s win in Omaha is yet another feather in the cap of the SEC when it comes to baseball.
For the SEC it’s the seventh straight national title. That’s impressive enough on its own. Unlike Nick Saban’s stretch of titles in football that carried the water for the league as a whole, baseball has boasted the depth of the conference at an incredible level. Oklahoma became the sixth different SEC team to win a title in the last seven years. Sixth! Three of those seven years were All-SEC finals in Omaha as well.
Oklahoma’s win made Skip Johnson the eighth active head coach in college baseball with a national title at the D1 level. Six of the eight are from the SEC. Those numbers are insane.
Justice for the Little Guy
There’s a world where this improbable win from a team who finished 11th in their conference is used in a misguided way to push for expansion in other sports. Football and baseball are not the same. Neither are basketball and football, but that hasn’t stopped greedy executives and commissioners from insisting that the “anyone can win” nature of a 64 team tournament should somehow be used as an example as to why we need a 24 (or more) team playoff.
What should be talked about is the process of how we got here and how Oklhaoma compared to other deserving teams before selection Monday.
This year’s committee used more acronyms than an AOL Instant messenger conversation from 2001. RPI, DSR, LOL. OMG. It was hard to keep up. But, when placed side by side, a team like Mercer, who felt like the biggest snub of the tournament, clearly got the shaft. They had an RPI of 28 compared to Oklahoma’s 24. The Sooners had a DSR of 31 and Mercer was No. 44. The RPI differential was four spots, and for one program it meant having a chance to go win a national title. For the other it meant they were left out of the tournament completely and now their entire roster is pillaged by Power Four programs in the transfer portal.
RPI? WTF? That’s wrong. TTYL.
