Selection Sunday: Weighing Oklahoma's Resume Ahead of the NCAA Softball Tournament

There’s little time to dwell on Saturday’s anticlimactic end to the SEC Tournament. 

The battle between top-seeded Oklahoma and 2-seeded Texas A&M would have been informative to the NCAA Selection Committee, who will reveal their bracket for the NCAA Tournament on Sunday at 6 p.m.

Entering the SEC Tournament, Patty Gasso wasn’t worried about where OU’s tournament resume stands. 

“Whatever we do, I mean, we're going to be in the top eight (seeds),” Gasso said last Tuesday. “I feel very confident of that. I trust that we're going to be in the top five. We can't win the SEC and not be, in my opinion. So we're going to go in and work our hardest to be our best to lend us into hosting at home. 

“So I do feel if we have a good SEC tournament, that might secure us to move up just one spot or so, which would make a difference.” 

Oklahoma finished 17-7 in the SEC, which will send 14 of its 15 teams to the tournament, and did nothing to hurt itself in Athens, GA. 

The Sooners picked up a win over LSU on Thursday in a battle between two teams who did not meet during the regular season. 

Gasso’s team then erased a 6-1 deficit against Arkansas, who OU swept during the regular season, before seeing Saturday’s championship game was cancelled due to severe weather. 

The SEC Tournament Championship game could have decided the top-overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, but as it stands, the committee will have to split hairs between the gaggle of teams at the top. 

Following the Sooners’ win over LSU, Oklahoma ranked seventh in RPI, a metric the committee heavily favors when considering what teams will capture the 16 national seeds. Friday’s win over Arkansas has yet to be factored into the formula on the NCAA’s website. 

Texas A&M, who missed out on a share of the regular season title due to a regular season game against Georgia getting canceled, is first in RPI. 

Florida, who took two of three games from Oklahoma on the final weekend of the regular season but was upset by Ole Miss in the SEC Tournament, ranks second in RPI. Florida State sits at third, LSU is fourth, UCLA is fifth and Arkansas is sixth.

How to Watch the NCAA Softball Selection Show

• When: Sunday, May 11
• Time: 6 p.m.
• Channel: ESPN2

Another metric the committee can factor in is D1Softball and 6-4-3 Charts’ Diamond Sports Ranking (DSR). 

DSR is another metric to project the strength of each team’s record, with a few key differences than RPI. 

DSR factors in margin of victory in each game, and the value of each game in DSR is fixed based on how teams were rated at the time of the contest, as opposed to changing as teams rise and fall throughout the year. 

Texas A&M finished atop the final DSR standings, with Oklahoma slotting right behind the Aggies at No. 2. 

Arkasnas is third, Florida State is fourth, Texas is fifth, UCLA is sixth, Tennessee is seventh and Florida rounded out the DSR’s top eight. 

If the Sooners aren’t awarded a top three seed on Sunday night, it’ll be down to the Sooners’ non-conference schedule. 

Gasso didn’t throw waves of top 25 competition at her team in the first month of the year by design, as she wanted her new-look roster to have time to gel. 

It was a tradeoff the OU coach is more than comfortable with, as she knew her team would be tested by a difficult SEC schedule. 

The non-conference strength of schedule ranked 183rd nationally, per D1Softball. Texas A&M’s ranked 10th, Florida’s ranked eighth and Florida State’s ranked fifth. 

Once conference matchups were factored in, Oklahoma’s strength of schedule ended up rated 16th-nationally.