Oklahoma Coach Skip Johnson: Sooners Need No More 'Oh Sh**' Moments in Postseason

Oklahoma baseball coach Skip Johnson found himself talking Tuesday about the usual tenets of baseball — patience, resilience, one pitch at a time — but also was trying to reconcile the start of the postseason.

That could go a long way toward explaining the Sooners’ 27-26 record.

“You know,” Johnson said, “some days it looks like they walk out there (and) they don't have a sense of urgency.”

Johnson often draws deeply from a zen mindset. He spent a lot of time on Augie Garrido’s staff, after all. But the Big 12 Tournament starts Wednesday. When the fifth-seeded Sooners take on the No. 4-seed Cowboys for the sixth time this season at 7:30 p.m. at Bricktown Ballpark in Oklahoma City, they’ll need to find another gear — or the season could be over quickly.

So how does Johnson find that balance between patience and urgency? Or, this being the postseason, is it all urgent all the time now?

“Just being present,” he said, “as much as anything.”

Johnson said being out of school sometimes makes a difference for some teams in the postseason. No longer encumbered by academic responsibilities, they have fewer hours away from the game and sometimes that lends to a greater focus.

“You want to get them out of the thinking phase into the automatic phase,” Johnson said. “And I think that's the deal we practice for every day, is trying to get them to the automatic phase, to where when it's hit, cross over to the left, boom, pick up, target, throw the ball.

“But in big games what they do is they get they get lost in that moment of the crowd, environment, you know, of not wanting the ball hit to him — in the ‘Oh sh**’ mode. ‘Oh shit, it’s hit to me; what am I doing now?’ But if you practice game-like, which we try to do as much as we can, and sometimes it's hard, but you're 100 percent right. How do you balance a sense of urgency and instill being in that moment? Because it’s a playoff moment.”

And as for the Sooners’ season being over if they don’t keep winning — the idea that OU needs to win the conference tournament and be an automatic qualifier if they want to make the NCAA Tournament — Johnson isn’t so sure.

“Did you get some information or something I'm not privileged to?” he asked. “I mean, doesn’t our conference have three teams that are hosting (a regional next weekend)? It’s a slap in our conference’s face if the top five teams in the conference don't get in. When you have three teams that are hosting, I mean, it’d be a slap in our face — a slap in our conference’s face. It just show you what a 12 baseball's about if they only took four teams of our conference and three teams are hosting — and I think two of them (Texas and TCU) may be top-8 seeds.”

The Sooners' RPI is currently 56th, but he likes his team's postseason chances. Winning some games in Oklahoma City, he said, would certainly help.

“That’s the way I look at it,” Johnson said. “But, if we can win two or three games, then we know that we’re in then.”