With One Game to Win the CWS National Championship, Oklahoma is 'Not Gonna Quit'

OMAHA, NE — One more time. One more game. One more chance.

Eternal glory awaits the winner of Monday night’s college baseball showdown between Oklahoma and North Carolina.

If OU wins, it’ll be the Sooners’ third national title and their first since 1994. That would also make the Tar Heels a three-time bridesmaid.

If UNC wins, it’ll be the first in the history of the program after two runner-up finishes in 2006 and 2007.

Both teams went 3-0 in College World Series bracket play to get to the best-of-3 Championship Series. Oklahoma won the opening game of the finals 9-3 on Saturday night. North Carolina took Game 2 on Sunday, 6-2.

History says North Carolina has the edge. Since the CWS implemented the best-of-3 series to decide its champion, there have been 12 instances where a team won the opener and lost game two. Those teams are just 4-8 in the deciding game.

But that’s just another statistic.

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Batting averages, earned run averages, WHIPs, RISPs, lefty vs. righty — all numbers to be crunched by purists and nerds alike.

Monday’s winner-take-all collision of Crimson and Cream and Carolina Blue will be decided by something harder to quantify, something impossible to measure.

Grit. Resilience. Resourcefulness. Heart. Determination. Toughness.

You can’t find those in the analytics report or the box score. But they do tend to show up on the scoreboard.

“I mean, we're comfortable in this situation,” OU shortstop Jaxon Willits said Sunday night after the Sooners’ nine-game winning streak came to an end. “We've proven all year long we're not going to quit. We're going to fight. No matter if we're up 10-0 or down 10-0, we're going to fight.

“And I feel like even you see that in the ninth there; we were fighting until the last out. And I feel like we're going to show tomorrow that we're not going to quit and we're going to fight no matter what.”

Indeed, down 6-2 and handcuffed by UNC pitching for most of the first eight innings, the Sooner hitters nearly staged a ninth-inning rally by nearly loading the bases before a game-ending double play.

In Oklahoma’s case, the Sooners have been largely pummeling the opposition since staging a remarkable comeback that sent No. 2 national seed Georgia Tech into the loser’s bracket of the Atlanta Regional, then repeatingthat the next day to eliminate the Yellow Jackets and send OU to the supers.

Skip Johnson’s squad has been riding an incredible wave of momentum, playing loose and free and enjoying stress-free wins over increasingly difficult teams, scores like 15-5 and 15-8 and 8-1 and 13-2 and 9-0 and 11-4 and 9-3.

But — what now? Can the Sooners recapture that wave of momentum in just 24 hours? Can they get away from easy, comfortable wins and get back to gritty, uncomfortable ones like 8-7 vs. Tech or 4-3 vs. Georgia?

“I thought we played gritty today. I thought we played resilient today,” Johnson said Sunday night. “I didn't see us not play resilient or play with any confidence. I thought we tried too hard.

“I don't think it's a momentum run as much as it is a confidence run. They're confident in themselves and they play for each other. And when you see that confidence, you just kind of get out of their way.

“If every baseball coach could bottle that and throw it on a team, it would be incredible. But that's not how it goes.

Confidence is a fragile piece of ice. That is, you can go one day and then the next day it's not there.”

No team in NCAA Tournament history has defeated more nationally seeded opponents than this Oklahoma squad (eight). They don’t care that they’re underdogs. They don’t care that historical numbers are not in their favor. They don’t care that nobody thinks they’re going to beat UNC again. They don’t care that their win streak is over or that they lost yesterday.

“Yeah, we have a saying: ‘Yesterday's dead.’ And I feel that's kind of been our motto through the whole year,” Willits said. “And I feel like we've got to move on past today. Today doesn't affect us anymore after this (press) conference right here. We're going to go on tomorrow and how we can attack them and how we can go out and win a national championship tomorrow.”

“I think those guys will be ready to play,” Johnson said. “I mean, we've faced adversity all year long and dealt with it. We have a lot of good leaders on our team.

“And I think it will be good. I think they'll pick each other up like they have all year long. They're selfless players. And I'm really excited for tomorrow, and can't wait to get here.”

The reality is that these two teams are here, standing over the national championship, because they’re both tough and gritty and determined and resourceful and resilient. These two rosters share many of the same intrinsic qualities away from the stat sheet.

“I believe in this team, and they believe in themselves,” said UNC coach Scott Forbes. “And in a weird way, they've played better, as they said, when their backs are against the wall.”

“Yeah, it will be an entertaining game for sure,” said OU DH Trey Gambill. It's going to be super fun as a player. I'm sure it's going to be super fun as a fan to see two teams just really fighting for a national championship.”

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