Oklahoma has had some huge baseball wins in its NCAA Tournament history, but none may be bigger or more dramatic than the Sooners' 8-7 walk-off win in 10 innings against No. 2 Georgia Tech on Monday to win the Atlanta Regional championship.
The Sooners (36-22) staved off elimination three times, including a pair of impressive comeback wins over a Georgia Tech team with the best offense in Division I baseball, and is moving on to Super Regionals for the sixth time in their history to match up against No. 15 Kansas (45-16).
The two longtime Big 12 foes will play a best-of-three series beginning Saturday at Hoglund Ballpark in Lawrence, with the winner earning a coveted spot in the College World Series.
Sooners at their best heading into Super Regional
The Sooners showed tremendous resilience and determination through a strenuous five games in the Atlanta Regional, something that was alarmingly absent over OU's 10 previous games leading up to the NCAA Tournament. Oklahoma had lost seven of its last 10 games with a slumping offense and a struggling pitching staff that had allowed nine or more runs in eight of the 10 games before learning it was headed to Atlanta to go up against the most prolific offensive lineup in college baseball this season.
Oklahoma came into the Atlanta Regional batting .280 as a team, seventh best in the SEC. In their five games in Atlanta, however, the Sooners averaged nearly 80 points higher, going 66-for-184 for .358. Georgia Tech, on the other hand, hit .328 (50-for-152) in its four regional games -- but just .269 in the three games against the Sooners -- after averaging .358 for the season.
Jason Walk, Jaxon Willits and Brendan Brock all had nine hits in the regional, and Dasan Harris had eight and six Sooners drove in five or more runs as Oklahoma averaged 9.8 runs per game and 7.7 against Georgia Tech, which had allowed opponents 4.9 for the season.
After suffering a 9-3 regional loss on Saturday to host Georgia Tech, the Sooners were faced with the onerous challenge of having to win three games -- one more over The Citadel and two against Georgia Tech -- to stay alive and advance out of the regional round for the first time since 2022.
From that point forward, though, the Sooners showed they were up to the challenge. The Oklahoma offense kicked into another gear, and in the three games following the loss to Georgia Tech, it was the Sooners, not the hometown favorites, that flooded the highlight reel. OU outscored its opponents in the three final games 38-18 and outhit them 45-27, along with seven game-changing home runs.
It wasn't just the relentless Oklahoma offensive display on both Sunday -- in which the Sooners had to win two games and scored 15 runs in each -- and again in Monday's dramatic and deciding Game 7, but the way in which it all unfolded that made OU's 14th NCAA regional championship so impressive and memorable.
Down 7-2 after three innings to Georgia Tech, Oklahoma unloaded for an eye-popping seven runs on six hits before a single out was recorded and added an eighth run before the side was retired to erase the five-run deficit and go up 10-8. The Sooners powered three home runs in the inning, including a base-clearing grand slam by catcher Deiten Lachance. The Sooners sent the Yellow Jackets into shell shock after the fourth-inning blitzkrieg and were able to tally five more insurance runs on the way to a 15-8 victory.
Oklahoma managed to carry over the momentum from Sunday's blowout win, scoring three times in the opening inning to take a quick 3-0 advantage in Monday's winner-take-all regional final. Georgia Tech scored twice in the third inning and twice more in the fifth on back-to-back leadoff home runs by the bottom two hitters in the Yellow Jacket lineup.
Just like that, highly favored Georgia Tech had erased OU's early advantage and gone out in front 4-3. The Ramblin' Wreck added insult to injury, scoring three more times in the sixth to extend the lead to 7-3 heading to the final three innings. But the Sooners were far from done.
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After being held scoreless and with just one hit for five consecutive innings after its three-run outburst in the first, Oklahoma scratched across a couple of runs in the seventh and single runs in the eighth and ninth to send the game to extra innings all tied at 7-7.
Sooner reliever Jackson Cleveland retired the side in order in the top of the 10th, setting the stage for the dramatic finish. After working a 3-2 count as the leadoff hitter for Oklahoma in the bottom half of the inning, Dayton Tockey connected with the next pitch from Georgia Tech reliever Tate McKee, sending a towering drive 454 feet over the batter's eye in dead center field for the decisive walk-off win and the regional championship.
Tock’d ‘em off 🚀@DaytonTockey pic.twitter.com/5d36g8xpaM
— Oklahoma Baseball (@OU_Baseball) June 1, 2026
Georgia Tech, the No. 2 national seed, was joined by six other top-16 seeds -- No. 1 UCLA, No. 8 Florida, No. 9 Southern Mississippi, No. 10 Florida State, No. 12 Texas A&M and No. 13 Nebraska -- that are out of the NCAA Tournament after being eliminated on their home field.
Several other telling observations that had a key impact on the Sooners' NCAA Regional upset of the country's No. 2 team
- No. 2 Georgia Tech is the highest-ranked team Oklahoma has beaten this season.
- Dayton Tockey's walk-off home run in Game 7 of the Atlanta Regional was his third of the regional and the first walk-off home run by a Sooner player since the 2008 Tempe Regional in a win over Vanderbilt.
- Georgia Tech's eight runs on both Sunday and Monday were the fewest runs scored by the Yellow Jackets since May 2.
- In 11 games since May 9 against Arkansas, Oklahoma has hit 28 home runs, including 11 in the Atlanta Regional.
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