“This was character building for this team,” Oklahoma coach KJ Kindler said afterward on ESPN. “They fought back hard. It was impressive. I give them full credit for sticking it out to the end. It was tough.”
The Sooners’ unraveling began early on. In the Sooners’ first apparatus of the night, the vault, three Oklahoma State gymnasts made big mistakes. The first gymnast to compete, Faith Torres, fell on the one-and-a-half-turn vault, while Jordan Bowers and Catherine Levasseur barely managed to get back up while doing the same trick with a deep step backwards. His two of those lower scores (9.45 and 9.375) factor into the Sooners’ total, since teams can only drop one score on him per equipment.
Since then, Oklahoma has been unlikely to come back, and it probably would have taken a big mistake by another team. Alabama suffered a beam meltdown with four falls, but Utah (197.9375 final score) and Florida State (197.875) were solid. The Sooners’ hopes ended in the third rotation when Levasseur and Eva Siegfeld fell during their beam routines.
“They were trying to give it their all, but at the same time I think their emotions took over a little bit,” Kindler said of his team’s response to an early mistake on vault.
Even if Oklahoma hadn’t gotten off to a disastrous start on vault, it might have been able to overcome its mistakes on vault, especially since four other gymnasts had scores of 9.9375 or better.
In that first rotation, Oklahoma posted a score of 48.325, which was more than a point lower than most teams have shown on this device this season. The Sooners hadn’t scored that low on any device since January 2021, and since 2012, Oklahoma has only struggled this much twice.
Consistency has been a hallmark of this Oklahoma team, which makes Thursday’s disappointing result all the more jarring. Prior to this meet, Oklahoma had never scored lower than his 197.775 score all season. Hours before the Sooners’ session began, LSU coach Jay Clark called Oklahoma a “wild favorite” to win the final.
According to , the Sooners have recorded 11 of the top 20 points in the nation this season. The road to the national tournament, a website that keeps track of all NCAA gymnastics scores. This is the most points by a team in the top 20 since Road to Nationals began tracking data in 1998.
The Sooners’ extraordinary dominance made them look unstoppable. This successful Oklahoma team may have been considered the greatest gymnastics team in NCAA history, en route to another national title. But despite their accomplishments so far this weekend, the Sooners will be remembered as a juggernaut that ended in a shocking collapse.