Selection Sunday for the 2025 NCAA Softball Championship is now behind us, and some among the Oklahoma Sooner faithful are not happy with OU's No. 2 national seed.
Texas A&M, which was to be the Sooners' opponent in the championship game of the SEC Softball Tournament, was awarded the coveted top seed in the NCAA tournament.
The controversy over the top two seeds in the NCAA Softball Championship was essentially created because bad weather in Georgia all day on Saturday forced the cancellation of the SEC tournament championship game between top-seeded OU and the No. 2 Aggies.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey elected to cancel the game and declared both teams co-champions rather than try to get the game in later in the day on Saturday or early enough on Sunday to finish ahead of the nationally televised selection show on ESPN2.
Here's the part that has fans miffed: Oklahoma earned the SEC's automatic berth in the 64-team NCAA tournament field as the regular-season conference champion and co-champion of the SEC tournament. But that, along with OU's 45-7 record, second-best in Division I softball, apparently wasn't enough for the selection committee to award the Sooners the top national seed in the NCAA tournament.
To those fans who are up in arms over the selection committee's determination of who the top two seeds are, I simply say, come on, does it really matter?
Yes, head coach Patty Gasso would have liked for OU to have been awarded the top national seed -- something the Sooners carried into three of the last four NCAA Softball Championships -- but I can assure you she is not the least bit concerned about whether Oklahoma is No. 1 or No. 2.
"We are not disappointed about not being the No. 1 seed," Gasso said Sunday after the selections were revealed. "We feel fine where we're at. I think the selection committee did a great job."
Gasso 'feels fine' about OU's seeding in NCAA Softball Championship
The Sooner head coach was more concerned that the four-time defending national champions drawing one of the top-8 national seeds, because that ensures that you not only get to serve as one of the 16 regional sites and draw one of the easier paths to the Women's College World Series, but if you win your regional you also get to host a super regional.
Oklahoma was the No. 1 national seed in just three of its last six national championship seasons. The Sooners were the No. 2 seed a year ago and beat No. 1 Texas for the national title. They were No. 3 overall in 2016 and No. 10 while winning the 2017 national championship.
You still have to win your games to get to the WCWS regardless of what your seed is, which is something Oklahoma has done with high regularity over the past four years. During that span, the Sooners are 9-0 with four regional championships, 8-0 and champions in the past four super regionals, and 21-4 in the Women's College World Series, all without ever having to leave the Sooner State.
Oklahoma and Texas A&M were arguably the best two teams in the best softball conference in the country this season, but unfortunately the two teams did not play each other during the regular season. That's why the SEC tournament showdown on Saturday would have been the perfect setting to short circuit any potential controversy. The winner of that game presumably would have been the unquestioned NCAA No. 1 overall seed.
But the SEC tournament championship was not decided on the field, and Texas A&M's case for the top seed heading into the NCAA postseason this week ostensibly carried more weight than OU's in the eye's and minds of the selection committee. Two big factors the Aggies had going in their favor were the No. 1 ranking in the ESPN.com/USA Softball Top 25, plus the highest RPI rating in NCAA Division I softball. By contrast, Oklahoma is No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, using those two measures.
Oklahoma and Texas A&M finished one and two in the conference standings, with the Sooners edging out the Aggies by a half-game for the regular-season title. Bad weather also forced cancellation of the final game in the series between A&M and Georgia back in early April. That resulted in the half-game difference between OU and the Aggies. Georgia won the first two games of that series, but had Texas A&M won the final game, it would have matched Oklahoma's 17-7 conference record.
In truth, the Sooners probably cost themselves the opportunity for the top overall seed when they lost two of three games at Florida as the then-No. 1 team in the country during the final weekend of the regular season. OU dropped out of the top spot in the national rankings after that.
If it wasn't apparent all season long that the SEC is easily the strongest softball conference in the country, it certainly was after the NCAA tournament reveal on Sunday. Seven of the top-8 national seeds are from the SEC. One through eight in order are: Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee and South Carolina.
Fourteen of the 15 SEC schools that participate in softball qualified for the 2025 NCAA postseason and nine SEC teams earned one of the top-16 national seeds. Only Missouri failed to make the field.
Could we see as many as seven SEC teams, including the Sooners, in the WCWS this season? The road to Oklahoma City begins later this week.
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