Oklahoma softball: Reminiscing on another specatacular Sooner season

The Sooners had to go through several games against higher-seeded teams to get to the finals

Oklahoma entered the 2017 Women’s College World Series as the defending WCWS champions, but also as the team with the second lowest seed in the eight-team field.

Only Baylor, a rival school out of the Big 12 but a team responsible for one of the Sooners nine losses on the season, was seeded lower than No. 10 Oklahoma. If the Sooners were going to be able to back up coach Patty Gasso’s contention that her team was disrespected by not being seeded higher, they were going to have to knock off several teams that had been seeded higher than they were.

The Sooners made fairly easy work of Baylor, the No. 15 seed, winning 6-3, throttled by a four-run first inning. That sent Oklahoma into the winner’s bracket and a matchup with No. 6 Washington, another team, like Baylor and Auburn, that already had recorded a victory over the Sooners in 2017.

With a day’s rest between her five-hit win over Baylor and her start against Washington, Paige Parker was even more dominant in pitching the Sooners to a 3-1 victory over the Huskies, allowing just three hits and striking out six.

Next up was Oregon, the No. 3-seeded team in the World Series field. The Ducks broke a scoreless tie, pushing across a couple of runs in the top of the fifth inning to put Oregon out in front 2-0 with just two more innings to go.

The advantage proved to be very short-lived, however, as the Sooners rallied to put a four-spot on the scoreboard in the bottom half of the fifth that erased the deficit and go up by two. The fifth inning turned out to be the only inning either team scored in, and OU held on for a 4-2 victory, their third win in a week’s time over a higher seeded team.

That set up the championship series with No. 1 Florida, a team that on paper held an arguable statistical advantage over the Sooners.