Skip Johnson is no scrub of a baseball coach.

His worst season at Oklahoma came in 2021, and it still resulted in a fifth-place finish in the Big 12. Even when his teams aren't elite, they're far from inferior.

But the even-numbered years have been particularly kind to the Sooners under the direction of their grizzled manager, and 2024 is no exception.

In 2018, Johnson and the Sooners made the NCAA tournament and wound up losing in the regional final to Mississippi State. Come 2020, they started off red-hot, going 14-4 before the COVID-19 pandemic brought the campaign to an untimely halt. As most everyone will recall, the charmed 2022 season saw Oklahoma catch fire down the stretch; the Sooners upset Florida in the Gainesville regional and Virginia Tech in the Blacksburg super regional to make the College World Series. Johnson's crew won their first three games in Omaha to secure a spot in the championship series, where they eventually fell in a two-game sweep to Ole Miss.

Here in 2024, the Sooners don't ostensibly possess the same star power that they boasted in years past. Future MLB outfielder Steele Walker and some guy named Kyler Murray keyed Oklahoma's run in 2018, while the pitching rotation in 2020 included a formidable cast of arms such as Cade Cavalli, Levi Prater and Jason Ruffcorn. In 2022, the Sooners had a pair of legitimate college baseball superstars in infielder Peyton Graham and center fielder Tanner Tredaway, plus a future top-10 draft pick in right-hander Cade Horton. But this 2024 squad doesn't have any particular player, or players, that command headlines nationally.

Yet they're 32-17, ranked No. 12 nationally by D1Baseball and squarely in line to host a regional for the first time since 2010. They've racked up six series sweeps in Big 12 play, including a road sweep of Texas Tech that marked the first time in 13 years the Red Raiders were swept in Lubbock. They've won 16 of their last 20 games heading into their final regular-season series, a road set with Cincinnati that kicks off this Friday.

So what's clicking for the Sooners?

It certainly starts at the top of the lineup with leadoff hitter John Spikerman, who has emerged as one of the most reliable bats in the country from the 1-hole. Though he missed several weeks earlier in the season due to a hand injury, Spikerman has epitomized the five-tool label when healthy. He's hitting .407 with three home runs and 27 RBI's, and he's added eleven stolen bases and 35 runs scored.

It also helps to have starting pitchers that can miss bats, and the Sooners have two such arms in Braden Davis and Kyson Witherspoon. Davis has K'd 89 hitters in 70.2 innings, while Witherspoon has logged 69 whiffs in his 65 innings of work. And though Brendan Girton has had his ups and downs on the mound throughout the year, he's also shown the ability to fire the pill past opposing hitters, striking out 43 across 32.2 innings.

But in order to understand why this Oklahoma team is truly to be feared in 2024, one needs only to understand the most basic principle of baseball. As anybody who's watched the movie Moneyball knows, the most important offensive statistic in baseball isn't home runs or batting average or stolen bases. It's on-base percentage. There are two possible outcomes in every at-bat: you reach base, or you record an out. How you reach base is beside the point. As Brad Pitt rhetorically asked in Moneyball, "Do I care if it's a walk or a hit?"

And from top to bottom, Oklahoma's lineup is rife with players who are not only capable of hitting the cover off the ball, but of wearing down the opposing pitcher with a quality at-bat and finding a way to reach base safely. Spikerman (.463 on-base percentage) and first baseman Michael Snyder (.460) have led the charge in that department, but the Sooners have four other lineup regulars with an on-base percentage north of .410. In 2022, among Oklahoma players with at least 100 plate appearances on the year, Graham was the only one with an OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) north of 1.000. This year, the Sooners have four such players in Spikerman, Snyder, Bryce Madron and Jackson Nicklaus. And this lineup doesn't merely consist of base-on-balls machines. Madron leads the team with a modest eleven homers, but the Sooners have seven players with at least 15 extra-base hits.

Moreover, if you wish to continue comparing this 2024 team with the Oklahoma squad that finished as the national runner-up two years ago, what's perhaps most jarring is the discrepancy in quality pitching depth. In 2022, the Sooners had only three pitchers with an ERA below 5.00: Horton, Jake Bennett and Trevin Michael. Lack of bullpen options proved to be the Sooners' undoing in Omaha, as there was no other viable stopper to call upon when an overextended Michael blew a late-inning lead in Game 2 of the championship series. If Michael couldn't slam the door on any given evening, no one else could.

But here in 2024, the Sooners face no such predicament. In stark contrast to the 2022 squad, the Sooners have eight pitchers with a sub-5.00 ERA, and that includes six relievers. Ryan Lambert, the electric right-hander who can crack triple digits on the radar gun, paces the team with a 2.40 ERA. If he can rein in his questionable command (he's averaging over one walk per inning), he's capable of morphing into the same shutdown weapon that Michael became in 2022. Right-handers Reid Hensley (2.70 ERA) and Malachi Witherspoon (4.82 ERA) have been strikeout machines, as they've fanned 49 total hitters in a combined 32 innings of work. It'll be paramount for Oklahoma to find a solid third starter as the Big 12 tournament draws near; neither Girton nor Grant Stevens (5.58 ERA) has been particularly consistent, and Texas Tech transfer Jamie Hitt (8.82 ERA) hasn't found a groove all season. But as David Sandlin demonstrated in 2022, sometimes postseason play brings out the best in a pitcher whose campaign has been theretofore pedestrian.

Getting to Omaha is difficult, and it shouldn't be taken for granted that the Sooners will end up in the CWS field. Heck, Tennessee strung together one of the most dominant seasons of all time in 2022, finishing the season an astonishing 57-9 — only to get bounced in the Knoxville super regional. What happens over the course of the regular season matters only for seeding purposes once the tournament arrives. Even so, it's not premature or outlandish to say that Oklahoma possesses all the pieces to claim the program's first national title in 30 years.

And perhaps most remarkably, this is a roster that bears little resemblance to the dynamic 2022 squad. Relievers Carson Atwood, Jett Lodes and Carter Campbell are the only remaining pitchers that recorded an out for Oklahoma in 2022. Meanwhile, the only remaining position players that made a plate appearance that year are Spikerman, Nicklaus, Kendall Pettis and Easton Carmichael. This isn't a team littered with holdovers from the previous run to Omaha. Does that reality make you feel better or worse about their odds to make another trip to the College World Series? That itself is a matter of perspective. But it's undeniably a major testament to Johnson's prowess as a coach and recruiter.

And it's not the first time he's had little issue replacing a bevy of cornerstone contributors. Scarcely two months after the 2020 season's abrupt cancellation, Johnson watched his entire starting rotation come off the draft board in the first four rounds (Cavalli went in the first round, Prater in the third and Dane Acker in the fourth). Yet two years later, the Sooners stormed all the way to the doorstep of a title. After the 2022 season, they had an astonishing eleven draft picks, including seven of the top 300 selections. Now here they are in 2024, once again on a collision course with the College World Series. And Johnson ought to be able to parlay that success into another nice raise this offseason.

It doesn't much matter what happens this weekend in Cincinnati, or next weekend in the Big 12 tournament. Obviously, the Sooners would love to stay on track to host a regional at L. Dale Mitchell Park, and they shouldn't have much trouble doing so if they keep up their prodigious offensive output (double-digit runs in 10 of their last 20 games). But in the end, regardless of where they're seeded or who hosts their regional, five wins will stand between this team and another chance at glory in Omaha.

And they're not here by accident. They're not pretenders. Their strength is in numbers. Even if there's no household name among their ranks, they're more than capable of achieving the ultimate goal that barely eluded them in 2022. Whether they do so is a matter of execution, of momentum, and of the little bit of good fortune that every championship run requires.

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