Oklahoma softball dealing with 'unnecessary pressure'

When you win four consecutive national championships and six in the last eight years a championship has been awarded, the bar is set incredibly high.

Oklahoma has dominated the world of college softball over the past decade. Since the Sooners won the third of their eight national titles in 2016, they have won 467 games and lost just 43 times. That is an average season record of 58-5 over the last eight years in which a full season has been played and an incredible winning percentage of .916.

So it is understandable that expectations for OU softball are high every year, as is for several nationally acclaimed Oklahoma athletic programs.

The Sooners seem to be struggling despite 31-3 record

But the 2025 season began a new era for Oklahoma softball. Not only did the Sooners lose five position starters and two starting pitchers to eligibility limits after last season -- 10 seniors in all -- but they took their bat and ball to a new conference, where some of the best softball programs in the country happened to reside.

Including OU, teams out of the SEC have won 10 of the last 12 national championships in softball. And as far as the current season, 12 SEC teams, including the top four, are ranked in the nation's top 25. That, of course, makes for multiple top-25 matchups on a weekly basis in the SEC conference schedule.

With so many departures from a year ago, this year's Sooner team has a much different makeup with only three starting position players and one starting pitcher back.

With all the personnel changes, you would expect there to be a reasonable drop-off in production and performance or at least an adjustment period as the newcomers became comfortable in a new system and environment. Despite this, head coach Patty Gasso's 2025 team started out like it ended the previous season, ringing up 19 consecutive wins leading into conference play.

Through its 19 straight wins to begin the season, Oklahoma moved from its No. 3 preseason ranking back into the familiar No. 1 perch it had held throughout most of the past four seasons.

The Sooners swept their first two conference series as new members of the SEC, taking three games from South Carolina at home and winning their first SEC road series at Arkansas.

Although OU was victorious in its first two SEC series, which had become quite customary over the last four championship seasons, there were stark indications in the series against 10th-ranked South Carolina that this season was not going to be the romp through the schedule it had been in recent years.

All three games in the South Carolina series were decided by one run and totaled a combined 41 runs. A signal perhaps of what was ahead in the fiercely competitive SEC.

Former Big 12 foe Missouri handed the Sooners their first loss of the season after 28 straight wins. Oklahoma rebounded from a 3-1 loss in the middle game of the series for a 5-1 win on Sunday and a third consecutive series win. OU dropped down to No. 2 in the rankings after the Missouri series.

Then this past weekend, Tennessee rode into Norman with the No. 10 ranking and rode back out with a pair of victories and a series win, and dealing the suddenly struggling Sooners a heavy blow to their collective confidence level.

You could tell from the body language of the Sooners after the loss to Tennessee in the series finale on Sunday that they are really down on themselves right now, which is something they can't afford to be going forward. Patty Gasso believes this group of OU women is trying too hard to be something they're not.

"You would have thought our season was over when we walked into that locker room," Gasso said after Sunday's game.

Some may think the sky is falling on the Sooner softball dynasty, but it can't be all that bad. After all, Oklahoma's 31-3 record is still one of the best in college softball, and so is this team.

The Sooners need to be careful and mindful when they start comparing themselves to the previous four Sooner teams. Those were extraordinary Oklahoma teams, and maybe several of the greatest of all-time.

The 2025 Oklahoma team is young, doesn't have the experience that the four- and five-year seniors had during the incredulous championship run and has vulnerabilities those teams didn't have, but it is still loaded with talent and highly capable of beating any team in the country.

The good news for those who are beginning to doubt this year's team is that there are not any truly great teams this season. There are a number of very good teams, though, and a number of them are in the SEC.

Oklahoma is one of those very good teams -- its record thus far says so. Finding ways to win in a conference as good as the SEC is what championships are made of.

"I believe in this team, I really, really do," Gasso said. "They do work and they want to be good. And what I see from that landscape is they want to be good so bad that they're not. ...

"There's just a lot of unnecessary pressure."

And the Sooner head coach knows exactly where it's coming from: It's a direct consequence of winning four consecutive national championships. It's a championship mindset.