Only OU team comparable to '22 softball juggernaut played football a half century ago

[47Straight]

Only OU team comparable to '22 softball juggernaut played football a half century ago
by Guerin Emig

If we compared Jocelyn Alo to Lauren Chamberlain during Oklahoma’s extraordinary 2022 softball season, we are beyond that now that the Sooners’ 59-3 masterpiece is complete.

Alo more closely resembles Lee Roy Selmon, for she just anchored the best OU team, regardless of sport, since the fabled footballers of 1974.

Alo is Lee Roy, same as Tiare Jennings is Dewey, Jayda Coleman is Joe Washington and Grace Lyons is Steve Davis.

And if you have stopped reading right here and decided, “This is just absurd, comparing present-day softball players to a 48-year-old football team,” then you have missed the point of what these softball players just did.

Forty-one run-rule wins in 62 games. Two-thirds of their season ended, literally, in mercy.

A 116-20 scoring bulge in the postseason, including a 64-17 count at the Women’s College World Series.

We spent the past 40 years believing teams are supposed to win WCWS games 4-3. Along came the ’22 Sooners to change the laws of conceivability.

They were patently absurd.

So yes, we do need to break the laws of comparability and find another sport to put present-day OU softball in perspective. This being OU, that sport must be football.

We could consider offense only and try on Baker Mayfield’s 2017 Sooners or Sam Bradford’s ’08 bunch for size. This is to be overwhelmed by the fact that Alo and Jennings, just the two of them, out-homered 252 college softball teams this season.

That, however, doesn’t do justice to the smoke OU pitchers Jordy Bahl or Hope Trautwein threw all spring, or to the defense the Sooners played in support of their flamethrowers.

Recall Patty Gasso’s description of the middle-infield play of Lyons and Jennings during OU’s WCWS knockout of UCLA: “Kind of their creative canvas.”

You could paint as pretty a picture of Coleman climbing the center-field wall and robbing Texas of an early home run in the WCWS clincher the other night.

If the best football teams compliment each other in their so-called “all three phases,” here was OU’s softball team doing so with offense, defense and pitching, better than it’s ever been done in their sport.

If the best teams of any kind have a high degree of sparkle — Washington and that vintage wishbone lit up OU’s ’74 football season — then Alo’s and Jennings’ power-hitting, Lyons’ and Coleman’s acrobatics and Bahl’s circle-stalking left tinsel everywhere they played.

If the best teams prove their mettle when revealed as human — the ’74 Sooners responded to the only close game of their season, a 16-13 victory over Texas, by tearing through the Big Eight en route to a national championship — well ...

OU responded to its April 16 loss at Texas by winning its next seven games 63-5; responded to its Big 12 Tournament loss to Oklahoma State by winning its NCAA regional 36-2; and responded to its WCWS loss to UCLA by beating the Bruins 15-0 a half-hour later.

The best teams do such things as a team but leave you remembering their individual star power.

Nearly 50 years later, YouTube shares golden moments from the Selmon brothers, Little Joe, Jimbo Elrod and Rod Shoate. It felt like every other Sooner on that team was an All-American.

Every other Sooner on the ’22 softball squad is an All-American. We’ll be watching and remembering their feats of strength and grace forever.

We’ll be watching and remembering Alo.

The best teams don’t need a mold-breaker who seemed larger than life when they played, and were definitely that in retirement. They don’t need them, but what a bonus if they have them.

That was Lee Roy Selmon 48 years ago. It has been Lee Roy ever since.

That was Alo throughout her pixie-dusted OU career, and never more than the ’22 season. She was already being revered while hitting home runs in Oklahoma City last week. Imagine the legend moving forward.

So isn’t just that this Sooners softball team compares to that Sooners football one. It’s that it compares favorably.

Ask right now which of the two reigns supreme, I would suggest it’s ’22 OU softball. Maybe that’s recency bias, the afterglow from Coleman’s glove, Trautwein’s arm or Alo’s bat.

I don’t know, though. Those numbers are only going to grow in stature over time. They are only going to seem more fictional.

They are real, however, much as we have to rub our eyes to see them.

The ’22 OU softball team is real. It’s a team whose like we have never encountered in their sport, and have encountered just once before at their university.

https://tulsaworld.com/sports/college/o ... 1ed8e.html

[ousbfan]

Thanks 47 for posting the nice comparing article