For head coach Skip Johnson and the Oklahoma baseball team, it has truly been a season that has carried some what-could-have been moments. But the Sooners also would like the spot they are currently in if you gave it to them before the season began.
The Sooners sit at 22-10 and 5-7 in SEC play heading into a series with Vanderbilt, but with several close losses in games that could have gone either way to Alabama and Texas. They currently find themselves in the bottom half of the SEC standings. Even with the most recent rocky stretch of play, Oklahoma still sits at No.16 in the D1 Baseball Top 25 rankings and in position to host a regional in Norman for the second time in the past three seasons.
In Baseball America's most recent bracket projection, the Sooners were the No. 15 overall seed and one of the final regional hosts. Oklahoma would host West Virginia, Mercer and Stonehill in the hypothetical scenario.
Sooners on cusp of hosting NCAA regional, but still need more
But if Oklahoma wants to stay on track to be one of the final regional hosts, it needs to win its first SEC series in several weeks as the Sooners head to Nashville to take on perennial power Vanderbilt. The Commodores are just above the Sooners in the conference standings, where they hold a 24-10 overall record while being 6-6 in SEC play. They are coming into this weekend off a series loss in College Station against Texas A&M and taking down Eastern Kentucky in their midweek contest, 3-0.
If the Sooners can get back to their winning ways and claim the series, they are going to need some more consistency from their starting pitching. Over the last couple of weeks, they have not had back-to-back great starts from Cam Johnson and LJ Mercurius. In their last two series, one of the two has gotten shelled in the first game of the series and put Oklahoma behind and forced the Sooners to come back in the series.
The other thing that the Sooners have to be better at in this series and going forward is they have to be better at hitting with runners in scoring position. In both of their losses to the Longhorns and Crimson Tide, there were several occurrences where they had a chance to pull ahead, but they just could not get the at-bat they needed to put them over the top. If they are going to win the series on the road, they are going to have to get the clutch hit when they need it the most.