Skip Johnson deserved this one.
The Oklahoma baseball coach earned 2026 National Coach of the Year honors from the American Baseball Coaches Association on Wednesday. The award came just days after Johnson led the Sooners to their first national championship win since 1994.
OU went 11-2 in the NCAA Tournament, beating the national No. 2 seed Georgia Tech, No. 15 Kansas, No. 3 Georgia, No. 7 Alabama and No. 5 North Carolina in the title series. The Sooners beat the Yellow Jackets, Jayhawks, Bulldogs and Tar Heels twice over the course of the three weeks. Those nine wins set a record as the most by any team since seeding started in 1999.
Johnson had previously made the national championship series in 2022 and has led the Sooners to the NCAAs in six of the eight full seasons he’s served as man. In fact, Oklahoma is his first Division I head coaching job. Johnson previously served as an assistant coach at Texas and head coach at Navarro College at the junior-college level.
It’s safe to say he can keep the OU job more or less as long as he likes.
OU’s run through Omaha featured the first-ever experience of a team reaching the championship by starting a freshman in every game. That didn’t change in the finale, either, as Johnson went to Cord Rager, Xander Mercurius and Nick Wesloski over the three-game set.
The move paid off as Oklahoma put up a 3.31 earned-run average in the NCAA Tournament and a 2.67 ERA in the CWS.
This article originally appeared on Sooners Wire: Oklahoma’s Skip Johnson named National Coach of the Year
