So Much Softball

2 days ago

While I have already covered the softball games that are most important to me from the past weekend, there was actually a lot of softball played since we last talked about it. In fact, I'm looking at the score sheet right now and I am starting to realize on last Friday alone there were far too many games to even mention. I'd probably guess hundreds if you figure in all the conferences across the NCAA that have teams playing. I was hoping to find something that would give me just the top 25 teams, but the NCAA site doesn't break it down like that.

Instead I have to roll back to ESPN to find the information I want. Which honestly drives me crazy because I really can't stand ESPN. There a number of reasons I feel this way, none of which I will probably get into in this post, but I will save that for a future post.

Number 23 Oklahoma State had a big day on Friday last week upsetting number 7 UCLA 4 to 3 and then number 8 Texas A&M 9 to 8. Number 19 Duke had an upset of their own besting number 8 Texas A&M 8 to 6. I guess it was a rough day for the Aggies... Duke also had a big take down of number 10 LSU 5 to 3.

Coastal Carolina upset number 15 Arizona 6 to 2, and my Michigan State Spartans had a nice upset over number 16 Virginia Tech 7 to 6. Even in the top 25 there was a ton of softball played given the fact that there were a couple invitational tournaments happening across the country. The key one was down in Florida at the Clearwater invitational. I don't know why people keep choosing to go to Clearwater, but they do. Apparently it is a beautiful area, but the scientologists would give me reason enough to stay as far away as possible. Nobody wants that drama.

I'm actually going to forgo covering all the games from the weekend and just talk about the rankings. Trust me, upsets are a bit more common in softball than they are in other sports, so if I shared every single one with you, we would be here all day.

Tennessee finds themselves sitting in the number 1 spot after a really solid showing this past weekend. They had some big wins over some big teams. That's up from the number three spot where they were last week. Texas Tech falls from the number 1 spot to the number 2 spot this week. Meanwhile, Texas falls from number 2 to number 3, and Oklahoma stays solidly in the number 4 position as well as Florida maintaining the number 5 spot.

Rounding out the rest of the top ten we have Nebraska, Florida State, Arkansas, Alabama, and Stanford. I'd like to see more Big Ten schools in the rankings, but for now we will just have to settle with Oregon, UCLA, and Washington. It's kind of sad that it's all the west coast schools (minus USC) that actually made their way into the rankings. Even Michigan has fallen out of the top 25 and they usually find themselves there.

I've said it before, softball is really big in the south and west coast and these rankings really prove that.

I'm going to leave it at that for today. My niece played a game last night against North Carolina, but I will cover that next week when I wrap up the full weekend for the Highlanders!