Were you busy this weekend negotiating a free-agent contract with the Miami Dolphins? Or maybe more mundane chores? Here are five things worth knowing from the week in college softball.
1. Florida and Auburn take the SEC show on the road
During what was the first weekend of conference play for much of the SEC, Florida and Auburn instead spent their time at the Judi Garman Classic in Fullerton, California, showing why the league demands such attention from all corners of the map.
In the span of a little more than 24 hours of real time across doubleheaders Thursday and Friday, Florida beat Arizona, Michigan and Oregon and avoided a letdown against San Jose State amidst those high profile games (a win the following day against Fresno State wrapped up a perfect 10-0 record over two weeks in California). That's the kind of muscle a team hopes it won't need to flex in the World Series but one that is nice to have if needed. The goal in Oklahoma City is to stay on the right side of the bracket and avoid playing more than once a day. Florida did that a season ago. Still, the arms are clearly available to navigate a busier schedule.
A week after Delanie Gourley shut out Oregon at a tournament in San Diego, besting Ducks ace Cheridan Hawkins in the process, freshman Aleshia Ocasio allowed just one earned run against Oregon in Fullerton. Ocasio now has to her credit both that performance and a two-hit, 10-strikeout game against Michigan in February, in which she didn't allow an earned run. Michigan dented Gourley's nearly spotless ERA in Fullerton, but it didn't matter after four innings of relief from Ocasio allowed the Gators time to rally. Gourley bounced back with a shutout against Arizona.
One reason for the success? Gourley, Ocasio and Lauren Haeger are walking 1.22 batters per seven innings. The Gators, with Hannah Rogers instead of Ocasio, were one of the most precise teams in the nation a season ago -- and their pitchers still walked 2.14 batters per seven innings. The current Gators have an 8-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio. No other team in the league has better than a 5-to-1 ratio. No team a season ago, including Florida, reached a 4-to-1 ratio.
Only one other team has shown the same depth of championship-caliber pitching as Florida this season. And what do you know, LSU visits Gainesville this week for a three-game series, which along with a series between Alabama and Georgia, makes the SEC the center of attention.
Florida put up some runs, too, but even it didn't do what Auburn did to Arizona in a 20-2 run-rule win. That result and a 7-4 win against Arizona State, a team with which Auburn coach Clint Myers has ample familiarity, spoke volumes as part of a 4-1 stay in Fullerton.
2. Rachel Fox makes her mark
As mentioned, while Auburn and Florida were winning out West, most of the SEC got down to beating up on each other. It paid to have pitching. LSU made it 25 wins in a row to start the season with a sweep against Arkansas. That completed a week in which each of its four pitchers started once and none allowed even a single earned run. Alabama's Sydney Littlejohn threw a five-inning perfect game to complete a sweep of Mississippi, her second perfect game of the season for a program that somewhat surprisingly only had one in its history when the season began.
But the most intriguing development from the first round of the games came courtesy of Texas A&M's Rachel Fox.
Fox went the distance in each of her team's first two games in a series against Kentucky and got the win on both occasions to improve to 12-3 with a 1.89 ERA on the season. That included an eight-inning head-to-head duel with Kentucky's Kelsey Nunley in the opener that required a two-hitter from Fox. A season ago, her first in the circle for the Aggies after she transferred from Texas, Fox allowed 31 home runs in 158 1/3 innings. Through 96 1/3 innings this season, she has allowed three home runs (one of those did come from the Wildcats).
Only Ole Miss and Arkansas finished with higher team ERAs than Texas A&M a season ago in the SEC, and the Aggies did not have enough offense to make up for it. Fox and Katie Marks (solid in defeat in her lone start this weekend) weren't bad, but the margin for error in the conference is between small and very small. Could Texas A&M, like Kentucky a season ago behind Nunley, have something in the circle? The Aggies opened conference play a season ago by taking two of three from a ranked Missouri team and got a pair of good pitching performances from Marks in the process. It wasn't a harbinger of things to come. But Texas A&M will presumably be happy to try again.
3. Oklahoma excels at home
Minnesota still has nearly a month until Michigan comes to town for the first softball of the season in the Twin Cities. The Golden Gophers must wait until April to face North Dakota State, too. And while the likes of Boston University and Boston College have home games scheduled for March, good luck to them. But as spring tries to make an appearance across much of the country, teams that spent the season's first month shuttling to California and Florida get to play some home games. One of four teams ranked in the top 10 a week ago that had yet to play at home, Oklahoma outscored Missouri State and Samford 44-0 and needed just 21 innings to win all four of its opening games at Marita Hynes Field in Norman.
And guess who made herself right at home?
With four home runs on the weekend, Oklahoma's Lauren Chamberlain reached 83 for her career and moved into a tie for fifth place all time with former Louisiana-Lafayette great Danyele Gomez. Chamberlain is now seven home runs behind all-time leader Stacey Nuveman. At her career pace of a 0.45 home runs per game, Chamberlain projects to tie the record in a midweek game against Arkansas on April 8 and then go for No. 91 during a three-game series at archrival Texas the following weekend (all three games helpfully available on the Longhorn Network). And if the pressure of the chase is present, it isn't noticeable. Chamberlain is hitting .510 with a 1.235 slugging percentage so far this season. Only one player, Georgia Tech's Jen Yee in 2010, ever slugged better than 1.200 for a season.
Yet Chamberlain wasn't even the team's strongest candidate for national and conference accolades. That instead was Erin Miller, who hit .800 (8-of-10) with three walks and led the team in extra-base hits (6), RBIs (12), total bases (22) and stolen bases (2). Along with Kady Self's return from injury and freshmen standouts Paige Parker and Nicole Pendley, Miller's development as a junior makes the lineup that much more than Chamberlain and Shelby Pendley.
4. The MAC strikes again
While not exactly a steady producer of ranked teams or national championship contenders, the MAC always seems to be good for some individual magic. That was Ball State slugger Jennifer Gilbert a season ago, but it seems to be the domain of the pitchers this season. Akron's Erin Seiler already earned mentions a few weeks ago for a pair of wins against Syracuse, and now Kent State senior Emma Johnson is front and center after a bravo weekend.
Playing a true road game at UCF on Friday, Johnson got the better of Knights ace Shelby Turnier by throwing a two-hit shutout, in which she struck out 18 batters. There are fewer than 30 pitchers in Division I history who have struck out more batters in a seven-inning game, a list joined earlier this season by Western Kentucky's Miranda Kramer. Only a couple of those performances came against ranked opponents (most notably Cat Osterman against Washington and Danielle Lawrie against Arizona State), let alone ranked opponents on the road.
Johnson, who threw a one-hitter to beat Kentucky a season ago, wasn't done, either. A day after beating UCF she pitched a five-inning no-hitter with nine strikeouts to beat Michigan State. Only a loss Sunday against Bradley spoiled her player of the week bid. For the season, Johnson is 5-2 with a 0.61 ERA and 82 strikeouts in 46 innings.
This arguably makes this weekend's three-game series at Michigan more intriguing than most Big Ten series would be.
5. ACC's triangle rules the diamond
Where will the challenge to Florida State come from in the ACC? The triangle made its case this past week.
North Carolina and NC State combined to go 9-1 during the first full week of March. That success included NC State's surprising three-game sweep of ranked Notre Dame to open conference play, as well as North Carolina's sweep of a doubleheader against Virginia Tech early in the week and victory over Texas among four weekend wins out of conference. Both the Fighting Irish and Hokies had looked like two of the strongest challengers to the Seminoles.
The Tar Heels scored 52 runs in their six wins and have shown an ability to score most of the season, if not always with the pitching necessary to generate consistent results. Making a bid for national player of the week, Amber Parrish finished the week with five home runs, four of them in the wins against Virginia Tech and Texas.
Meanwhile, NC State began the week with a curious loss at Elon that dropped it to .500 on the season, although its previous losses had come against World Series contenders Florida, Louisiana-Lafayette and LSU. The Wolfpack rebounded from that midweek setback with 21 runs in three games against the Fighting Irish, taking much of the sting out of the coming weekend's series between Notre Dame and Florida State in the process.