CWS Bracket Two Team Preview: Oklahoma Sooners

The 2026 Oklahoma Sooners have been an evolving story, a team finding its identity at precisely the right moment. Playing in their second season as members of the SEC, the Sooners finished the regular season with a 36-22 record (14-16 in conference play) under ninth-year head coach Skip Johnson. There’s no sugarcoating it: that conference record wasn’t very good. If the college baseball season had ended on May 15th the Sooners would already be preparing for 2027. But that’s not how college baseball works, and every year there seems to be at least one team in Omaha who got hit at just the right time and found themselves in title contention as a result. 2026’s surprise has to be the Sooners.

In the preseason SEC coaches poll, Oklahoma was picked to finish 14th in the league, making their College World Series run one of the more stunning turnarounds of the college baseball season. Despite a difficult stretch to close the regular campaign, the Land Thieves caught fire when it mattered most. The team lost four straight series headed into the postseason, giving up at least nine runs in nine of their final 12 regular-season games, but their freshman pitchers helped turn the ship around completely once postseason play began.

 Now for the 12th time in program history, Oklahoma is going to Omaha. The Sooners took down Georgia Tech in the Atlanta Regional and then handled Kansas in the Lawrence Super Regional, finishing off the Jayhawks in a 13-2 rout to punch their ticket to the College World Series for the first time since 2022.

The pitching staff’s resurgence from late season struggle has been driven by two freshmen who have quickly become the faces of the rotation. Cord Rager, a left-hander, started Game 1 of the Super Regional and delivered six scoreless innings, allowing just one hit while striking out six. Over the course of the season, Rager compiled a 3-3 record with 61 strikeouts against only 18 walks, going at least five innings in five of his 11 starts.

His counterpart, right-hander Xander Mercurius, has been equally impressive in a hybrid starter-and-reliever role. Mercurius struck out 27 batters in 28.2 innings during the regular season, and in Game 2 of regionals, he set a career high with eight strikeouts against Georgia Tech, throwing 100 pitches. Both freshmen have been invited to the 2026 USA Baseball Collegiate National Team Training Camp, a testament to their breakout performances. Closing duties have largely fallen to junior LJ Mercurius (Xander’s older brother) , who has earned saves in each of his last three appearances and recorded 15 strikeouts over his last five outings. 

On offense, the Sooners have been powered by a combination of reliable veterans and a late-season power surge. Deiten LaChance leads the team with 62 RBIs on the season, while outfielder Dasan Harris has driven in seven runs during the postseason run. Junior LaChance had zero home runs in the first 31 games of the season but has now blasted 15 in the Sooners’ last 29 games, becoming one of the most dangerous hitters in the lineup. Perhaps the most dynamic story belongs to Dayton Tockey, who hit a walk-off home run in the 10th inning of a regional comeback win and now has six home runs in his last nine games, despite starting only 28 of the team’s 60 contests.

As we discussed earlier in the week Oklahoma enters the College World Series as one of five SEC teams in the eight-team field, facing an all-SEC group that includes No. 7 overall seed Alabama, No. 3 overall seed Georgia, and No. 6 overall seed Texas. The Sooners went 1-2 against Alabama and 0-3 against Texas during the regular season, and they have not faced Georgia at all in 2026. On paper, that bracket looks daunting. But remember this is a team that already knocked off Georgia Tech, the tournament’s No. 2 overall seed, on the road. Their pitching staff has lowered its ERA from 5.15 on the season to 3.33 across their six tournament games. Momentum, youth, and growing confidence make the Sooners a genuine threat to make noise in Omaha, even if few would call them the favorite.