The SEC Softball Tournament opened Tuesday at John Cropp Stadium in Lexington, Kentucky, with three games. No. 1 seed and defending co-champion Oklahoma, though, makes its tournament debut on Thursday night.
The Sooners (48-7, 20-4) will face the winner of the Wednesday game between No. 8 LSU and No. 9 Georgia in the quarterfinals. Oklahoma, which won the SEC regular-season title for the second straight season, is seeking to become only the third SEC team to capture both the regular-season and conference tournament championship in back-to-back years.
Oklahoma heads into SEC Softball Tournament eyeing conference sweep
Moreover, if the Sooners are successful in pulling off their double championship two-peat, they will have done so in their first two seasons as members of the SEC. Oklahoma was actually co-champion of the SEC Tournament last season, along with Texas A&M, when the championship game between the two teams was canceled because of inclement weather.
With 11 of the 15 SEC teams that participate in softball ranked in this week's ESPN/USA Softball Top 25 rankings and five of the top six teams nationally in RPI, the SEC Tournament sets up as the most competitive of all of the conference postseason tournaments. Any team in this league is capable of beating another in a single-elimination tournament.
Read more: Oklahoma’s SEC Softball Tournament path doesn’t include a single gimme
Nine SEC teams are truly capable of making a deep run and even win the conference tournament in a single-elimination tournament, which should make for an interesting and somewhat unpredictable four days of action.
Another intriguing measure of the competitive strength of the softball teams in the SEC is the fact that Arkansas, the team that ranks No. 1 in RPI, is only the No. 7 seed in the conference tournament. Interestingly, Oklahoma, the SEC regular-season champion and No. 1 in the national polls, is No. 6 in RPI.
Six teams, including the Sooners, have won the SEC regular-season softball title and the tournament championship in the same season. Both LSU and Florida have done it four different times, Alabama twice, and Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina and OU one time each. Only LSU, Florida and Alabama, though, have done it in back-to-back years.
LSU, in fact, strung together four consecutive regular-season SEC championships from 1999-2002 and won the conference postseason tournament title in three of those seasons. South Carolina won the tournament championship in 2000, preventing LSU from completing a double championship four-peat.
Florida did something similar, winning four straight regular-season championships between 2015 and 2019, but the Gators managed to take home the tournament championship trophy just once in those four seasons in 2018.
Alabama ruled the roost in the SEC from 2010 to 2014, winning four regular-season titles, including three in a row between 2010 and 2012, and two tournament championships in 2010 and 2012.
Before changing conference affiliations, moving from the Big 12 to the SEC in 2024, Oklahoma won 15 Big 12 regular-season championships, including 11 straight between 2012 and 2023, and nine conference tournament titles. Only four times, however, did the Sooners win regular-season and tournament titles in the same season (1996, 2017, 2018, 2021).
An SEC Tournament championship to go along with the conference's regular-season title should provide the Sooners with the No. 1 overall seed in this year's NCAA Tournament. They were the No. 2 national seed a year ago.
While the No. 1 seed is a position Oklahoma clearly would like to have, it is more important in head coach Patty Gasso's view to come out of this weekend with a top-four or, at the very least, a top-eight overall national seed. That would ensure the Sooners of hosting both an NCAA Regional and Super Regional and never having to leave the state of Oklahoma the rest of the season.
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