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    OU Baseball: Oklahoma Lands NCAA Tournament Bid

    The Sooners are the 3-seed at the Charlottesville Regional in Virginia and will open tournament play on Friday.

    Just one year after one of the best seasons in school history, Oklahoma is back in the NCAA Tournament.

    The Sooners (31-26) are a 3-seed and will play East Carolina (45-17) in the Charlottesville Regional at the University of Virginia.

    Host Virginia (45-12) will play Army West Point (38-16) in the other side of the regional bracket.

    OU and ECU will play at 6:p.m. CT on ESPN2. First-round games also will be televised by ESPN+.

    The winner of the Charlottesville Regional plays the winner of the Conway Regional, featuring host Coastal Carolina, Rider, UNC Wilmington and Duke in next week's super regional round.

    OU went into Monday’s NCAA selection show in real peril of being left out of the field.

    The Sooners came out of the weekend at No. 40 in the NCAA’s RPI, dropping a spot after their Big 12 Tournament losses to Texas Tech and Oklahoma State. They were just 11-13 in Big 12 play and went 1-2 in the tournament and finished seventh in the Big 12 standings.

    There was also a fear that some of the NCAA’s auto-bid stealers, like Tulane winning the American Athletic Conference Tournament with a 19-40 record, might keep the Sooners out of this year’s field.

    But Oklahoma also owns the No. 15 strength of schedule, according to Warren Nolan, which no doubt played into securing a bid.

    In fact, the NCAA revealed that OU was the next-to-last at-large team invited to the field. 

    As evidenced by the overall record and the conference record, the Sooners were stricken with radical inconsistency all season. Using the RPI formula, OU was 12-13 against teams from Quadrant 1, 5-5 against Quadrant 2, and 14-8 against Quadrants 3 and 4.

    OU has won 12 of its last 19 games and has 15 wins against NCAA Tournament teams this season.

    The past decade has been a mostly rough stretch for Oklahoma baseball, which has now made 40 all-time NCAA Tournament appearances, third among Big 12 teams behind Texas and Oklahoma State, but only four in the last decade.

    That includes last year’s historic run, which ended in the championship series of the College World Series in Omaha. Oklahoma won the Big 12 Tournament, then went unbeaten to the CWS finals but lost both games in the championship series.

    Before that, however, OU missed the NCAA Tournament in 2019 and 2021 (the 2020 tournament was canceled).

    Oklahoma made the bracket in Skip Johnson’s first season in 2018, and also made it in 2017 in Pete Hughes’ final season after three straight years with no postseason appearances.

    The OU program  has plenty of familiarity with playing postseason games in Virginia, including just last year. This will be the fifth time since 2010 the Sooners play there, including the 2010 Charlottesville Super Regional, the 2012 Charlottesville Regional, the 2013 Blacksburg Regional and the 2022 Blacksburg Super Regional.

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