Someone is missing from the Women’s College World Series.
For the first time since 2018, the finals won’t include Oklahoma, the record-setting, four-time defending national champions. The Sooners were bounced from the tournament on Monday by Texas Tech and star pitcher NiJaree Canady, ending one of the greatest runs by any team across any sport in NCAA history.
But Texas will be there, and probably happy to see the Red Raiders, not the Sooners.
Since 2022, the Longhorns have dominated the tournament against every opponent but Oklahoma. Texas is 10-5 overall in Women’s College World Series play over this span but 1-5 against their rivals, getting swept in the finals in 2022 and again last season to highlight the immense gap that had separated the Sooners from the field. The one win came in Saturday’s 4-2 victory that left the Sooners on the brink of elimination.
That Oklahoma is no longer in the Longhorns’ path makes them the favorite to capture the first national championship in program history. But that will require getting past Canady, the Stanford transfer who has almost single-handedly carried a program without any significant history of success to the summit of the sport.
The best-of-three series will begin on Wednesday night and continue through Friday, if necessary. Here are the key factors on the mound and at the plate that will decide the first finals matchup of two programs from the same state since UCLA met California in 2004:
Can NiJaree Canady carry Texas Tech all the way?
The national player of the year at Stanford last season and one of three finalists for the award this season, Canady, who also is regular in the team’s batting order, is the most impactful player in college softball. She’s also been a transformative figure for a program that had made only six previous tournament appearances in program history and had never advanced past regional play.
Monday’s win to knock Oklahoma out of the tournament moved Canady to 33-5 on the year with a Division I-best ERA of 0.90 and 304 strikeouts. She is one of two players with at least 30 wins and one of three with at least 300 punchouts. And the junior has been near her best against the elite competition in World Series play, allowing just four runs on 16 hits in her last 28 innings of work.
Clearly, Canady has the arm to carry Tech all the way to the national championship. She has thrown every pitch for the Red Raiders in Oklahoma City and can go all three games of the finals. In three complete games in a five-day span over this past weekend and would’ve started both ends of Monday’s doubleheader had the Sooners won the first elimination game.
Texas softball has advantage at the plate
The Red Raiders rank 34th nationally in batting average, 75th in home runs per game, 35th in scoring at 6.1 runs per game and 47th in on-base percentage. While far from a pushover at the plate, Tech’s pathway to the finals has clearly been blazed by Canady’s right arm.
In comparison, Texas is an offensive powerhouse with few rivals in the country. The Longhorns are second in the batting average, rank 13th in scoring at 7.3 runs per game and rank in the top 16 nationally in slugging percentage, home runs and on-base percentage.
They have three players in the top 20 in the country in hits. Senior Mia Scott’s .438 batting average ranks 19th nationally. Junior Reese Atwood ranks 14th with 21 home runs and is tied for first with 86 RBI. Sophomore Katie Stewart ranks seventh with 78 RBI and homered to give the Longhorns the lead in Monday’s 2-0 win against Tennessee in book a spot in the finals.
Head-to-head history favors Texas
Texas has historically owned this series and was particularly dominant across the program’s final few seasons in the Big 12 before last summer’s departure for the SEC. The Longhorns have won 14 in a row against Tech dating to 2021 and have dropped just two games against the Red Raiders since the start of the 2017 season. Overall, the Longhorns own an 56-11 edge in the head-to-head series.
This includes a pair of wins during a two-game set in Austin in February. Texas took the first game 2-1 in extra innings, winning a pitching battle between Canady and Texas sophomore Teagan Kavan. Canady went eight innings and struck out 11, while Kavan had a career-best 18 strikeouts and allowed just four hits on 147 pitches.
Kavan went the distance in wins against Florida and Oklahoma before pitching the final three innings and allowing just one walk against the Volunteers. On the year, Kagan is 26-5 with an ERA of 2.33 and 16 complete games in 31 starts.
That first game shows how this World Series is likely to unfold: with both teams scratching out runs where they can against some of the best pitching and pitchers in the country.
But in the second game of that February set, Texas scored four runs in the first, another six runs in the third and run-ruled the Red Raiders in an 11-0 win. Freshman Samantha Lincoln gave up two runs without recording an out and took the loss, while junior Chloe Riassetto was tagged for nine runs, seven earned, over three innings of work.
And that shows the second way the finals could play out, with the Longhorns’ bats stepping up on softball’s biggest stage to bring the national championship to Austin for the first time.