Oklahoma State Crushes Clemson (Again) To Advance To Super Regional

“We own Clemson” is a phrase I hope I’m also using for various other reasons about seven months from now, but for now it’s plenty to describe Oklahoma State’s performance in regionals. It beat Clemson 9-2 on Sunday night after a 12-2 beating on Saturday night.

To sum up … OSU outscored overall No. 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament Clemson 21-4 in a 24-hour span. After the Pokes got a jewel of a game from Tyler Buffett on Saturday, they got an equally great four-hit, six-inning outing out of Jensen Elliott on Sunday.

And a Corey Hassel salami was more than enough offense.

Corey Hassel BLASTS a grand slam and Oklahoma State leads Clemson 5-0 in the 5th! #RoadToOmaha pic.twitter.com/zV7qKwQI98

— NCAA Baseball (@NCAACWS) June 6, 2016

The irony here is that the NCAA irritatingly pushed back the start of Clemson’s earlier game with Western Carolina because everyone thought it would rain. It didn’t. But that mean OSU-Clemson didn’t start until after 9 p.m. local time. The only thing that fell from the sky on Sunday in Clemson was hit after hit from Oklahoma State (12 in all). And probably a few Clemson tears of course but that wasn’t worth getting the tarp out over.

So now OSU will play in its fourth Super Regional and it could play host if everything breaks right on Monday. South Carolina is in a dogfight with the teams in its own regional. It actually lost its opening game to Rhode Island (!) before coming back to beat Duke, Rhode Island and UNC Wilmington consecutively. It will have to beat UNCW again on Monday to advance and play host to OSU. Otherwise the Pokes are looking at hosting three games to go to the College World Series.

But no matter what happens now, OSU is playing with house money. Nobody really expected them to step into the Clemson regional and walk away with a victory against one of the eight nationally-seeded teams. Their reaction at the end of the game said it all too. No celebration. No screaming and hollering. No dogpile. Handshakes and hugs and onto the next one.

In this case, the next one is to go to Omaha.