What started out with a bang three months ago ended in a resounding thud on Love's Field on Sunday. No. 3 national seed Oklahoma laid a surprising a goose egg and conceded the Norman Super Regional championship in a 6-0 loss to underdog Mississippi State, which is now headed to Oklahoma City and the Women's College World Series for the first time ever in place of the Sooners.
The Sooners, featuring one of the top offenses in college softball again this season, were as flat as a pancake offensively, collecting just three hits off of a Mississippi State pitcher making her first start of the season.
Oklahoma's quest to make a 10th straight WCWS appearance came to a crashing halt in front of a sellout Sooner crowd as an upstart Mississippi State team playing its best softball of the season surgically picked apart an OU team that appeared as listless and uninspired as it has this entire season.
Oklahoma softball season ends in a whimper as Mississippi State stuns Sooners
Just two weeks ago, the Sooners were the top-ranked team in the country, but three of their 10 losses have come in their last seven games. Meanwhile, the Bulldogs have won six of their last eight games after going 9-15 against SEC opponents this season.
The Mississippi State roster isn't blessed with elite talent that Oklahoma possesses, but the Bulldog players stepped up in this series and apparently wanted it more than the Sooners did.
"I think sometimes when you want something so bad, sometimes it doesn't come out that way," Sooner head coach Patty Gasso said in her teary-eyed postgame press conference. "This team wanted it bad. They've taken hacks, we just kept flying out. I think sometimes we're just overswinging or our angle was wrong. We got some to the wall, but just nothing hard hit. ...
"That's not lack of ability, it's lack of focus."
Junior left-hander Delainey Everett drew the surprising call as the Mississippi State starter in the deciding game of the Norman Super Regional. She had seen just 12.0 innings of action this season before the Super Regional, but she performed like a seasoned veteran against the power-laden Sooner lineup and in an extremely hostile environment. She pitched a three-hit, complete-game shutout, allowing just seven OU baserunners the entire game.
Oklahoma has been held to three or fewer hits in just three of 62 games this season, and you have to go back seven years and 399 games to the last time the Sooners failed to score a run in a game. Alabama defeated OU 1-0 in eight innings in the 2019 Women's College World Series. It has been even longer than that since Oklahoma had been shut out on its home field. The Sooners suffered an 8-0 loss to Baylor during the 2015 regular season.
What Mississippi State does offensively is far from flashy. The Bulldogs are disciplined at the plate, make good contact with the bat and hit a lot of seeing-eye ground balls that find the outfield and keep the line moving. They were the second-worst hitting team in the SEC this season, but they manage to take advantage of the opportunities the opponent gives them.
And that's precisely what happened in Sunday's deciding game. Mississippi State jumped on Oklahoma starter Miali Guachino for two quick runs in the top of the first on Sunday and followed that with single runs in the third and fourth innings and another two-spot in the fifth to complete the scoring. Three of the Bulldogs' six runs came on home runs.
There is little question that the potent Oklahoma lineup is easily capable of outscoring opponents in any given game, but the Achilles heel of this team all season has been the inconsistency of a pitching staff that is below what you typically see from a Patty Gasso-coached team. And that weakness was exposed in the Super Regional loss to Mississippi State.
In the two OU losses, Sooner pitchers did not have their best stuff and were working behind in counts too often. Guachino, a sophomore transfer from Ole Miss, started Games 1 and 3 for Oklahoma and was not particularly effective in either game, which drew a lot of media and fan criticism regarding Gasso's decision to start Guachino over ace Audrey Lowry in the winner-take-all game.
Oklahoma committed 30 errors in 62 games and ranked No. 4 nationally in fielding percentage (.981), but it committed an uncharacteristic five errors (four in one game) in the Super Regional vs. Mississippi State.
The Sooners were the third-best hitting team in college softball this season, wielding a .384 team average. In the three-game series with Mississippi State, however, OU was held more than 100 points below its season average. The Sooners batted a collective .265 (22-for-83) in the three games against the Bulldogs.
Mississippi State's hitting in the Super Regional series wasn't much better than Oklahoma. The Bulldogs were 25-for-93 at the plate for a .268 average, relatively close to their season average. Their hits, however, proved to be more timely and productive than Oklahoma's.
Oklahoma's 187 home runs this season are the second most in NCAA Division I history, but the Sooners were homer-less against Mississippi State on Sunday, something that has happened in just five games all season.
So what was once a promising Oklahoma softball season (the Sooners started out the season 25-2) has now officially ended. The Sooners finished with a 52-10 overall record, the 10th consecutive season with 50 or more wins, and a 28-3 record at home.
While the Super Regional loss to Mississippi State was heartbreaking for Gasso and the Sooners, it also was bittersweet for the longtime Oklahoma head coach. The head coach in the other dugout, Samantha Ricketts, played for Gasso in 2006-09 and was a two-time All-American at OU.
Read more: Patty Gasso gives heartbreaking Oklahoma quote right after season-ending loss
Prior to this year's Super Regional, Oklahoma had won 10 consecutive series, including nine consecutive against SEC teams. This is the second time Ricketts has taken the Bulldogs to the Super Regionals and just the team's second Super Regional appearance in program history. It will be Mississippi State's first appearance in the Women's College World Series.
The Sooners are 23-3 all-time in Super Regionals and are 11 of 13 in Super Regionals hosted in Norman.
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