Four years ago this month, the Oklahoma baseball team was in the same position it is this year, advancing to the championship series of the Men's College World Series with a chance to win a third national title.
The Sooners (45-24) defeated Texas A&M for a second time in the 2022 CWS, with a win over Notre Dame in between, to advance to the championship series against the Ole Miss Rebels, who were making their sixth MCWS appearance but had yet to win a national title.
Ole Miss swept the best-of-three championship series over the Sooners, winning 10-3 and 4-2 in back-to-back fashion, to win Hoddy Toddy's first national championship in the sport of baseball.
Both Oklahoma and Ole Miss were back in the Men's College World Series again this year, although Ole Miss was the first team eliminated. The Sooners, however, are back to the championship series. And this is where the parallel with the 2022 Ole Miss team becomes something worth pondering.
Read more: Oklahoma couldn't be set up any prettier to finish CWS with a national title
The resemblance between 2026 Oklahoma and 2022 national champion Ole Miss is strikingly similar
Like Oklahoma this season, Ole Miss finished the 2022 regular season with a 14-16 record in the SEC, tied for eighth-best in the conference that season, and 32-21 overall. That was good enough to earn the Rebels an NCAA Tournament at-large bid, and they were assigned to the Hattiesburg Regional as the No. 3 seed out of the four regional teams.
The Rebels had to defeat No. 1 seed Miami (Florida) and No. 2 seed Arizona twice to make it out of the regional, and that sent them to a Super Regional showdown against No. 11 national seed Southern Miss.
By now, you're probably catching on to the connection we're making. Ole Miss rolled through its Super Regional series with Southern Miss, posting back-to-back shutout victories, 10-0 and 5-0, and punched its ticket to the College World Series.
Ole Miss was not one of the top-16 national seeds that season. Thus, like Oklahoma this season, the Rebels had to go on the road in postseason play and prevail over all comers to earn their way to Omaha, which they did with a perfect 5-0 record.
Also remarkably similar to the 2026 Sooners, Ole Miss was the ninth out of nine SEC teams to make it into the 2022 NCAA Tournament. Oklahoma was the 12th out of 12 SEC teams to make the postseason tournament this season.
Additionally, the rosters of both the 2022 Ole Miss team and this year's Oklahoma group were not as blessed with All-America caliber talent as some of the teams both had to go through to stay alive in the postseason and make it to the hallowed ground that is the College World Series.
Once in the eight-team MCWS field in 2022, Ole Miss surprised quite a few people by taking down No. 14 Auburn 5-1 and defeating Arkansas, the team with the third-best record in the SEC that season, twice. That put the Rebels in the championship series against Oklahoma, where the Ole Miss momentum proved to be too much for the Sooners to handle.
Could we be witnessing an eerily similar and unforeseen championship run by Oklahoma this season?
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