OMAHA, Neb. — Don’t call it a comeback. They’ve been here for years. Nor should we call it a revenge tour. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and this is a city of flame-grilled meats. Besides, revenge isn’t really these guys’ style.
No, when the 79th NCAA college baseball championship series begins Saturday afternoon in Omaha, Nebraska (3 p.m. ET on ESPN), North Carolina and Oklahoma will be in the business of seeking to shoo ghosts of Men’s College World Series past.
We can be overly romantic about the Road to Omaha, and we should be. Even in its modernized downtown state, the eight-team NCAA event still feels very much old-school. An annual family reunion in eye black. A national championship tournament that still retains the spirit of a kids’ travel ball weekend.
But as with all affairs of the heart, the MCWS is also sneaky ruthless. When the dream to reach college baseball’s pinnacle event ends with that same event ripping out that heart and showing it to you on live national television.
The Heels and Sooners know that hardball-horror movie feeling.
“The beauty of baseball is that you never know what might happen next, but that also works both ways,” Oklahoma shortstop Jaxon Willits said Friday. “The history of this series, it tells you that we should expect the unexpected to happen. And when that happens, no matter what it is, someone will benefit from that, but you know what? Someone also won’t.”
For every thrill of victory, there has been agony of defeat. These two programs have reached this weekend via a series of wins, some unexpected, some when they were very much back on their, ahem, heels. And both programs know all too well about that Omaha agony.
This is UNC’s 13th trip to Omaha, but it has yet to return to Chapel Hill with a champion’s trophy. Only one other program has made more visits without a ring, Carolina’s ACC rival Florida State, which is 0-for-24. Nine of UNC’s MCWS berths have come since 2006. This is the third time it has made it to the finals. Its first two came in back-to-back seasons (2006-07).
The defeat in ’06 still ranks among the most painful in college sports. Anyone at Rosenblatt Stadium that night can still hear the gasp that went out into the midwestern night. With two outs in the bottom of the eighth and the score tied 2-2, Oregon State had runners on first and second when pinch hitter Ryan Gipson bounced a chopper to second baseman Bryan Steed. He missed badly on his throw to first, and the Beavers scored what proved to be the title-winning run.
It wasn’t UNC’s first error of the night. It had four in all. UNC lost a rematch with Oregon State one year later. But any poor soul who dares to bring up that error to any Heels fan of a certain age needs to have their defenses ready.
“I remember waking up for Game 3 against Oregon State in 2006, and I sat down and looked at my breakfast, and I couldn’t eat it. I was that nervous,” Scott Forbes said Friday. This is his sixth year as UNC head coach, but 16th on the coaching staff. He was an assistant under Mike Fox for both of those losses to OSU. “I wouldn’t do that now. I’ll be excited, but I want our players to embrace the moment and to understand that you don’t want to look back and be like walking on eggshells and fearing what would happen if we didn’t win.”
So, two decades later, what does the coach carry with him about that night and nightmare?
“You’ve got to go for it. Live in the moment. Go after every single pitch and not think about the end goal,” Forbes said. “I have really stepped back and said, ‘Man, like, let’s embrace this and get the elephant out of the room.’ I talked to our players about that last night. ‘Hey, we’re playing for a national championship. You’re going to have nerves. It’s going to be harder to sleep. Invite that. Embrace it. Talk to it. Because that’s not fear. That’s excitement.'”
For the Sooners, the Omaha memories of what might have been are much more recent. Their 2006 was 2022, when they smoked their way through the postseason, winning the Big 12 tournament and then upsetting Florida and Virginia Tech in their home stadiums to arrive in Omaha, where they vanquished No. 5 Texas A&M. But in the finals, Oklahoma was swept by Ole Miss, the 64th and final team allowed into the NCAA tourney field.
Unlike UNC, the Sooners have won the Men’s College World Series before. They did it twice, in 1951 and 1994, one of only 15 schools to win multiple titles. But when old-timers are sitting at Omaha steakhouse booths talking about MCWS history, no one mentions Oklahoma in the same breath as fellow two-time winners Stanford or Vanderbilt, and certainly not with LSU, USC or — look away Sooners faithful — Texas.
“I think a lot of Sooners fans can tell you right off the top of their head how many championships that football, basketball and softball have won,” Barry Switzer said Wednesday night after Oklahoma defeated No. 3 Georgia to advance to the championship series. “But they couldn’t have told you about those two baseball championships. At least not until now. People are learning because Skip [Johnson] and these guys are making them learn!”
Johnson is in his ninth season as coach of Oklahoma. He was at the helm during that ’22 near-title dash. During his 10 years as an assistant coach at Texas, he was part of three Longhorns teams that made it to Omaha, including a 2009 squad that was ranked No. 1 in the nation and the heavy title favorite. The Longhorns went 3-0 to make the finals and forced a third and deciding game in the championship series, where they were tied 4-4 before a nightmare fifth inning gave the title to LSU.
“You learn from all of that, for sure, but I don’t want you to think that for four years I have sat around reliving 2022 and what I could have done different,” Johnson said Wednesday after clinching the title spot versus Carolina. “I haven’t. There’s nothing good that’s going to come from that.”
On Friday afternoon, as his team prepared for its final pre-championship series practice, he expanded on that thought.
“I think I’m the same guy. I mean, I still do snuff. I still deer hunt … you don’t all of a sudden wake up one morning and you become a different coach,” Johnson said. “Our culture is just trying to get everybody to buy into your culture. That’s the similarities I see in Scott and our program.”
Johnson motioned to his team, a group that entered the NCAA postseason having not won a weekend series since mid-April and that was bounced from the SEC tourney in a single game. But since then, it has looked very much like that 2022 team, having defeated No. 2 Georgia Tech and No. 15 Kansas on the road. In Omaha, the Sooners beat No. 7 Alabama and No. 3 Georgia twice. They also hit homers at a ridiculous rate — the Sooners hit 46 in their first 43 games but 45 over their past 20 — and used a bunch of true freshmen on the mound, along with a slot machine of starting lineups that has left nearly every player on the Oklahoma roster game-tested and ready to go for this weekend.
That feels an awful lot like someone who is all in on the Scott Forbes “go for it/live in the moment” mentality. And that shouldn’t be a surprise. When the two saw each other for the annually awkward coaches’ photo op with the championship trophy, they hugged and laughed like old friends. Because they are. It’s a kinship forged by two longtime assistant coaches who shared countless motel lobbies and bleachers on the road recruiting.
“Those guys go through a lot of pressure every day, and we try to get out in front of them and teach them not to go through the same things that we went through as coaches,” Johnson said Friday. “Respect baseball, respect their opponent and play hard. And if we’re not going to do that, we wouldn’t be up here today. We wouldn’t be playing for the national championship. If I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t be coaching anymore.”
That’s dedication to a game they love at the event they love. Even if that game and event sometimes — heck, most of the time — doesn’t love them back.
“The guys who played on the teams in ’06 and ’07, we have met a lot of them, and a lot of them are going to be in Omaha to support us,” UNC first baseman Erik Paulsen Jr. said Friday as the Heels exited the field into the third-base dugout and Oklahoma began to file in through the first-base tunnel. “None of us would be here if they hadn’t built this program into what it is. To repay them with a national championship is the least we could do to say thanks.”
