Oklahoma softball: Dishing out the best/worst of a championship season

The 2021 national champion Oklahoma softball team may not be the greatest team of all time, but it was clearly the greatest this season.

The Sooners missed out on a fifth national championship in the 2019 season, when UCLA and Player of the Year Rachel Garcia defeated Oklahoma in the Women’s College World Series championship series. That was the last year the WCWS was held because of the COVID-19 pandemic year in 2020.

That wasn’t the case this time around. Oklahoma was ranked No. 1 virtually the entire 2021 season and started off the season winning the first 33 games. When you add that to the seven games in a row they won in 2020 before the rest of the season was cancelled, the Sooners were riding a carryover winning streak of 40 consecutive games before Georgia handed them their first lost of 2021.

The Sooners ended the regular season as Big 12 champions and a nation-best record of 45-2. OU were awarded the No. 1 national seed in the NCAA postseason, and the Sooners lived up to it, finishing off the job this time with a 5-1 win over Florida State in this year’s WCWS championship series.

It’s not how you start but how you finish that matters most

“I knew we were good. What got us here was great leadership, a great staff, great strength coach, great hitting coach, great pitching coach.” — Sooner head coach Patty Gasso, after OU won its 5th national softball championship

Despite being stunned in the opening round of the 2021 WCWS by James Madison — the Cinderella team in this year’s tournament, going 2-0 in its first two games with wins over No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 5 Oklahoma State — the Sooners overcame having to win four elimination games out of the losers’ bracket just to make it to the championship.

Then, in the first game of the best-of-three championship series with Florida State, Oklahoma appeared overmatched by an energized group of Seminoles that spanked the top-seeded Sooners 8-4 and left them having to win the final two games to achieve their season-long goal.

The rest is history, as they say.

The WCWS championship was the topper to a season like no other in Sooner softball history.

Oklahoma has actually won more games in a season — six other times the Sooners have won more than 54 games in a season, with a high of 66 by the 2000 national championship team — but only one other time have they lost as few as four games over a full season (2013, another OU national championship team).

Whether the 2021 edition of OU softball is the best in school history is open to conjecture. Because it ended in a national championship, it certainly qualifies as one of the very best, but there were also some very good teams in the past two decades that did not celebrate a WCWS championship.

As good as the 2021 Sooners were, they are the only WCWS champion Oklahoma team that lost a WCWS game on the way to winning the national crown and the only one that had to to it from the loser’s bracket. The Sooners’ suffered two WCWS losses this year — double their regular-season total — and faced six elimination games in the championship journey.

Record-setting championship season

But this fifth national championship season was about more than becoming the last team standing. It was also about how they went about achieving college softball’s ultimate prize.

Oklahoma finished the season ranked No. 1 in practically every major offensive statistical category. The Sooners led the country in batting average (.405). over 50 points higher than the second best team; home runs (161); runs (638); on-base percentage (.490, and slugging percentage (.778).

They also led all of NCAA Division 1 softball in shutouts (23), and 35 of their 56 wins were decided by run rule.

It was a record-setting season for the Crimson and Cream. The Sooners’ 161 home runs in 60 games set a new NCAA record for a single season, eclipsing the previous record of 158 set by Hawaii in 66 games in 2010. Oklahoma also set a new national record in runs scored with 638 (10.6 per game).

You can also add OU’s 15 home runs and 49 Sooners crossing home plate in eight WCWS games to the record book.

When you have a softball season like Oklahoma, it is difficult to find any real negatives. In the context of this article, perhaps we should call them “disappointments” instead of “worsts.”

Clearly the 7-6 loss in eight innings in the first game of a doubleheader at Georgia was a low point. That snapped a 33-0 streak to open the season. The Sooners’ resilience showed in the second game as Oklahoma rebounded for a 12-3 run-rule victory.

Two weeks later, OU fell victim to in-state rival Oklahoma State 6-4 in the first of a three-game Bedlam series at OSU. The Sooners came back to take the final two game in the series and a week later defeated the Cowgirls again, 10-2, to win their seventh Big 12 tournament title.

Oklahoma placed five players on the 2021 WCWS all-tournament team (Jocelyn Alo, Mackenzie Donihoo, Kinzie Hansen, Tiare Jennings and Nicole Mendes), and, not surprisingly, pitcher Giselle “G” Juarez was named Most Outstanding Player.

The best and worst of those player honors is that only Mendes and Jaurez will not return for the 2022 season.