A pair of SEC teams are in the 2023 College World Series championship series, making it three teams from that conference to make it that far in the past two season. Oklahoma baseball is the fourth team in that mix, having been the opponent of last year’s national champion Ole Miss as the last two teams left standing in last season’s CWS.
LSU, seeded No. 5 in this year’s NCAA Baseball Championship, is up one game to none over No. 2 Florida in this year’s championship series with a chance to take home the championship trophy with a win over the SEC Conference regular-season champion Gators on Sunday.
The SEC, arguably the strongest NCAA baseball conference and where Oklahoma will be playing baseball beginning in 2024-25, is assured of having a national champion in baseball for the fourth straight year. Mississippi State was the College World Series champion in 2021 and Vanderbilt came away the winner in 2019 (the CWS was not held in the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic year).
Oklahoma’s path to the CWS last season was not the easiest. Ironically, the Sooners defeated host Florida in the Gainesville Regional, then did the same against host Virginia Tech in the Super Regionals to advance to the College World Series in Omaha for the 11th time in their history and only the second time as a member of the Big 12 (2010 was the other).
The Sooners defeated Texas A&M 13-8 in the opening round of the 2022 CWS, Notre Dame 6-2 in a battle of first-round winners, and then Texas A&M again, 5-1, earning OU a matchup with Ole Miss in the championship series.
Oklahoma was the only undefeated team heading into its championship series with Ole Miss, which began on this date in 2022. The Sooners were 3-0 in the CWS heading into the championship series against Ole Miss. The Rebels entered the series with one CWS loss over four games, having to beat Arkansas twice to advance to the finals.
It was all Rebels in the championship series, though. Ole Miss pounded 16 hits off of five Oklahoma pitchers to win Game 1 in the series 10-3. Six of their 10 runs came in the final two innings. The second game in the series was much closer. The game was scoreless through five innings before broke through with a solo home run in the sixth to take a 1-0 lead.
The Sooners scored a pair of runs in the top half of the seventh to go in front 2-1. That’s the way things stood until the home half of the eighth inning. The Rebels pieced together three hits, aided by a pair of wild pitches by OU closer Michael Trevin, and scored three time to erase the Oklahoma advantage and take the lead 4-2.
Ole Miss closer Brandon Johnson struck out all three batters he faced in the Oklahoma ninth to preserve the win and give Ole Miss its first national championship in six CWS appearances.
The loss to Ole Miss in the championship final overshadowed a spectacular performance by Sooner starting pitcher Cade Horton, who worked into the seventh inning, allowing just two runs on four hits and striking out a career-high 13 hitters while not walking a batter.
“It brought a gut-wrenching end to a magical final two months for a team picked to finish sixth in the preseason Big 12 Conference poll,” was the way an OU press release described the CWS championship series loss to Ole Miss.
The Sooners finished the 2022 season winning 18 of their final 25 games to finish 45-24 overall and ranked No. 2 in the country.