Despite Early Season Struggles, Oklahoma Determined to 'Win the Whole Damn Thing'

The Sooners had their ups and downs this year, but after beating Notre Dame at the College World Series they're the first team to break through to Wednesday's bracket finals.

OMAHA — Oklahoma wasn’t one of the 16 national seeds when the NCAA Tournament began. The Sooners weren’t the betting favorite to win the College World Series.

But after three days in Omaha, OU is the first team to start 2-0 and is the first team to jump ahead to the coveted bracket finals on Wednesday.

Nobody else really believed in the Sooners. So when did the Sooners themselves start to believe that this was possible?

“I think we've always thought that ever since we got started and got rolling in the Big 12 Championship,” senior center fielder Tanner Tredaway said Wednesday night as the Sooners sent red-hot Notre Dame into the losers bracket with a 6-2 victory at Charles Schwab Field. “I’ve said it before, I'll say it again, our thing is we want to prove people wrong and make a statement, and we were able to do that in regionals and supers, and we want to do that here.”

OU won its last five Big 12 Conference series of the season and then won four straight games in the Big 12 Tournament to qualify for the NCAA Tournament.

But the Sooners also dropped a midweek loss on the road against a struggling Wichita State team — by the catastrophic score of 18-0 — just over a month ago in the final week of the regular season.

Early in the year, OU was swept by LSU, UCLA and Tennessee in the Shriner’s Classic in Houston — by a combined score of 28-7.

In March, the Sooners dropped two of three at home against New Orleans — a team that finished 30-23 but scored 29 runs against OU.

“Winning the national championship's always been kind of the goal,” said freshman third baseman Wallace Clark. “And we've had that in mind from the very beginning, and it's not just a new idea.

“Even after, like, a loss in a mid-week game in the front half of the season, we had talks with Skip (Johnson) and Reggie (Willits) and everybody, and the idea behind was it doesn't matter if we lost here, we're still going to go win the whole damn thing.”

Being able to stay focused on that long-term, big-picture goal is a rare gift — especially for a team that experiences such highs and lows over the course of a season.

“I feel with our team, we're good at not looking ahead,” said redshirt freshman pitcher Cade Horton. “We're good at staying in the moment and focusing on winning a pitch instead of focusing on the bigger picture.

"We focus on the task at hand, and I think that's where a lot of our successes came from.”

“To us, it's kind of an expectation to do well,” Tredaway said. “And we're rolling right now and we're going to keep riding it.”