Jenni Carlson NewsOK.com Blogging Community

It’s difficult to say who’s more shocked right now — the college baseball world or Oklahoma baseball coach Sunny Golloway.

All indications were that the Sooners had to win the Big 12 Tournament to get into the NCAA Tournament. They finished eighth in the conference, for goodness sakes. Hard to fathom that a team that needed a win on the last day of the regular season just to get into the conference tournament would ever make the NCAA Tournament as an at-large team.

Golloway said as much.

Heck, I said as much.

Yep, after OU dropped a heart breaker to Texas on Saturday morning, I wrote that the season was over. The Sooners made a frantic, fantastic finish but fell just short.

But now, we find out that they’re playing on.

I was wrong. Golloway was wrong. All of college baseball was wrong, and frankly, it’s difficult to understand, seeing as how Baylor and Kansas State didn’t make the NCAA field. The Bears finished sixth in the conference, the Wildcats seventh and played for the conference crown Sunday. Their seasons are finished, but the Sooners’ season is not.

It’s bizarre.

You can’t blame the Sooners; all they did is play out the season. There is blame, though, and it falls squarely on the selection process. Shouldn’t the process be easy to understand? Shouldn’t the coaches and the players have a fairly good idea about their fate before the field is announced?

There will always be surprises. Bubble teams get left out. Seeded teams aren’t seeded as high as they think they deserve to be.

But word out of Norman is that Golloway and the Sooners were so sure of their fate that they turned in uniforms and did exit interviews on Sunday. The players have scattered, returning home or heading toward summer league destinations.

Doesn’t it say something about the selection process when that type of certainty meets with the opposite outcome?

The system is flawed, and that’s a shame.

OU is the beneficiary. College baseball is not.