Texas and Oklahoma Baseball will bolster an already strong SEC

If the SEC wasn’t already a juggernaut in College Baseball, the conference will grow even stronger in 2025 with the addition of Oklahoma and Texas.

Although both teams will open the 2025 season unranked, these two programs are two of the best in the history of the sport. Texas’ all-time 3,701 wins rank second in NCAA history, while Oklahoma’s 2,770 wins rank 19th all-time. They aren’t just regular season teams either, as Texas has made the NCAA Tournament 63 times (first all-time) while Oklahoma has punched its ticket to “The Big Dance” 40 times (T-7th all-time).

“People have asked that question like ‘hey what are [Oklahoma and Texas] like in baseball'”, Kentucky Baseball head coach Nick Mingione said on “The Nick Mingione Show” Monday. “And I said, ‘well Oklahoma was just in the College World Series a couple of years ago and Texas has been to the College World Series more than any other team, over 35 times. All we did was get better. So it’s like okay we added two teams, the all-time leader in Omaha appearances plus a team that was just there a handful of years ago. So definitely should be good for our league.”

The Longhorn baseball program is entering a new era, led by former Texas A&M head coach Jim Schlossnagle. From 1911-2024, Texas employed just five head coaches. Schlossnagle, who is fresh off a run to the 2024 Men’s College World Series Finals at A&M, will become just the sixth head coach at Texas in the past 113 years. Schlossnagle conjured up a firestorm this offseason when he departed A&M for rival Texas just days after they lost to National Champion Tennessee. He’ll look to get the Longhorns back to the Men’s College World Series in 2025, and if he does, it will mark the 39th in program history.

Texas’ 38 Men’s College World Series appearances (with the last one coming in 2022) are 13 more than any other program (Miami FL with 25).

Oklahoma sports an extremely strong program as well, fresh off a 2024 Big 12 Regular Season Championship (first in program history) and an NCAA Tournament appearance. Head coach Skip Johnson returns for his eighth season, where he is 229-153 (85-65) in his tenure. The Sooners were listed as a team that just missed out on D1Baseball’s Preseason Top 25 Rankings.

“You look at the rankings in the preseason and it’ll tell you just how powerful [the SEC] is,” Mingione said earlier this week. “We won the SEC a year ago, finished fourth or fifth in the country, and we didn’t even get ranked. So that just tells you the depth of our league. The SEC has played for the National Championship in 15 of the last 16 years. A team from our league. No other sport in our league can say that. It’ll be good again, but that’s what we signed up for.”

Kentucky will host both programs at Kentucky Proud Park this season. They will face the Sooners for the first time ever, while facing the Longhorns for just the second time. The Wildcats are 0-1 against Texas, with their lone loss coming all the way back in 1993. Kentucky hosts Oklahoma the weekend of April 11-13 and Oklahoma May 9-11.