Oklahoma softball: Reminiscing on another specatacular Sooner season

OU didn’t live up to its 2017 preseason No. 1 ranking early on

Oklahoma opened the season with a loss to No. 2 Auburn, the team it had beaten in the WCWS championship series, the season before. Two days later, they lost to No. 13 Washington to go 2-2 in their first four games of 2017. Two weekends later, the Sooners would fall to another ranked opponent, Tennessee.

Through the first 10 games of the season, the nation’s preseason No. 1 team had played three ranked opponents and lost to all three. It should be noted, however, that all three losses were by one run.

Some would chalk it up to the hangover effects of having won a national championship eight months before. Call it what you will, but it was indeed a highly ominous start for a team with such high expectations.

Perhaps the lowest point of the Sooners’ season came in mid-March when they lost back-to-back 3-1 games to an unranked Cal Poly team. Their overall record at the time was a very respectable 23-7, but OU had not lost two consecutive games since the first two games of the 2016 season, a precarious start for a national championship-caliber team.

Oklahoma would play 40 more games, including the postseason, after suffering the two losses to Cal Poly and lose just two more times the remainder of the season – once to Baylor, that snapped a a 17-game OU win streak, and then, improbably, in their opening game of the NCAA Tournament, against North Dakota State.

Head coach Patty Gasso will tell you that the Sooners learned a lot from the late season losses to Baylor and North Dakota State and actually got better after both defeats.