Oklahoma’s early exit at the SEC Tournament opened the door for UCLA to take the lead in the home run race.

Kendall Wells, who was named the SEC Freshman of the Year on Friday for her outstanding 2026 season, went 0-for-3 with a walk in Thursday’s defeat to Georgia, meaning she enters the NCAA Tournament sitting on 36 home runs.

She’s no longer chasing former Arizona star Laura Espinoza, however.

UCLA slugger Megan Grant hit home runs on Friday and Saturday to equal and surpass the record set by Espinoza in 1995.

Grant broke the record in the top of the third inning in Saturday’s Big Ten Championship Game. She hammered the 0-2 delivery from former OU pitcher Jordy Frahm for home run No. 38.

The solo shot put the Bruins up 2-0, but Frahm and the Cornhuskers roared back to win the game 7-2.

Wells still has the entire NCAA Tournament to chase down and pass Grant. Her next home run will tie Espinoza’s mark of 37 long balls.

It wouldn’t be the first time things have shifted in this massive 2026 home run race, either.

OU was the first team to catch and surpass the 161 home runs hit by the 2021 Sooners.

UCLA’s run at the Big Ten Tournament flipped the race.

The Bruins homered four times against Penn State on Thursday and four times on Friday against Wisconsin before Grant’s record-breaking blast on Saturday.

As a result, UCLA will enter the NCAA Tournament having hit 182 home runs to Oklahoma’s 174 home runs, and the Sooners have played one additional game.

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Both teams a virtually guaranteed to be hosting regionals when the full NCAA Tournament field is revealed on Sunday evening.

Despite the loss to Georgia, Oklahoma is in strong position to earn a top four seed in the tournament. Patty Gasso’s team enters the tournament 48-8 overall, including a 20-4 mark in SEC play during the regular season, which clinched the program’s second-straight regular season crown.

Should the Sooners advance out of the first weekend of the tournament, they are also projected to host a Super Regional at Love’s Field.

UCLA finished the weekend 47-8 overall following their run at the Big Ten Tournament, and the Bruins went 20-4 in league play during the regular season.

The NCAA Tournament Selection Show will air on ESPN2 on Sunday at 6 p.m.

Tensions over changes to transportation between the Oklahoma County Detention Center and courthouse reached a peak during a special meeting of the jail’s governing trust on Friday.

Early in April, Sheriff Tommie Johnson III announced he would no longer task any of his own deputies with driving inmates and detainees the half-mile route from the jail to their court hearings, effective May 11. However, from May 11 through June 30, Johnson’s plan included keeping some deputies on the assignment to train and work alongside the jail’s own detention officers.

Along the way, other members of the jail trust have expressed some concerns about the trust’s ability to fully assume the transportation duties.

Oklahoma County’s district attorney, chief public defender, and presiding judge all made rare appearances at the trust meeting on Friday to share some of their own thoughts.

“I want you to consider this decision on whether or not the detention center should take over transport of detainees from the jail to the courthouse, because there is no plan,” District Attorney Vicki Behenna told the trust. “There are no employees at the detention center right now that can fulfill this obligation.”

Behenna also cited concerns that the already understaffed jail would face a worsening staffing situation if it has to pull some of its existing detention officers to provide transportation.

“In my opinion, and the opinion of other lawyers in my office, the indenture requires the Sheriff’s department to do transport,” she added, referencing the indenture which created and assigned control of jail operations to the trust in 2020.

Sheriff Tommie Johnson III cited his own budget concerns as a reason to discontinue the transportation service. His office believes it needs roughly 17 to 19 more deputies inside the courthouse for court security, and it could begin by reassigning

Presiding District Court Judge Sheila Stinson shared her own remarks with the trust, stating that this week alone, three judges had faced death threats. Johnson said his ambition is to have a deputy in every courtroom.

Ultimately, Behenna suggested the trust should not accept the end of the contract and that the sheriff has a duty to continue providing the service, regardless of if the sheriff is paid for the service.

In response, Sheriff Johnson accused the district attorney of being misleading.

“Considering the gross amount of misrepresentation in this section, and relative ease to obtain the correct information, I must assume — I must assume — that this was intentionally misstated to persuade this body to make an ill-informed decision to further the DA’s agenda,” he said.

The district attorney and sheriff eventually got into a back-and-forth.

“Sheriff Johnson, I don’t understand why you have such a visceral reaction to me,” Behenna stated. “If the DA has an agenda, my agenda is public safety.”

Tensions settled some later in the meeting, with trust members still pressed to find an alternative solution.

Trustee Derrick Scobey proposed a solution for the trust and sheriff to work together to find a private partner to operate the transportation service, rather than tasking their own in-house staff to perform the duties.

Sheriff Johnson eventually agreed that his office could help identify a private partner, but that the timeline for gradually taking his deputies out of the task would remain.

Jail administrator Tim Kimrey acknowledged that three of his detention officers would be available starting Monday to work alongside three of Johnson’s deputies to train and learn about the transportation duties while both parties work to find a private partner.

Kimrey said his office had already begun some research on private jail transportation partners, including The GEO Group, TransCor, and LaSalle Corrections.

The trust postponed officially accepting the end of the sheriff’s contract until its next meeting.

For the time being, Oklahoma State will not opt in to the credit line through the Big 12’s recent deal with RedBird.

In case you missed it last week, the Big 12 approved a five-year agreement with RedBird Capital Partners, becoming the first conference to have a league-wide, private capital deal.

The deal provides the Big 12 with a $12.5 million capital infusion while the league’s institutions have the opportunity to opt into a $30 million credit line that would have to be paid back with a “double-digit” interest rate, according to ESPN.

It doesn’t sound like many (if any) schools will take RedBird up on that deal, and that includes Oklahoma State. OSU athletic director Chad Weiberg spoke with Dave Hunziker in a podcast that released Friday, where Weiberg cleared things up from the OSU side of things.

“First of all, I give commissioner (Brett) Yormark a lot of credit for providing opportunities to the schools to look at,” Weiberg said. “He is an innovator. He pushes the envelope. He’s not afraid of trying new things to better the conference and all the member institutions. So, I think there’s a little bit of a misconception on this. This isn’t a private equity deal. There’s no ownership stake or control in the conference they’re taking. It’s more of a private investment opportunity. RedBird is a huge global entity. They’ve got a lot of partnerships. The conference office will get out of it some money to be able to invest in some other business entities, take an investment in those to try to grow revenues from a different revenue stream. I think that’s something that’s worth exploring in this time that we’re in. And then the schools have the option to opt into a line of credit through that, and that’s up to each institution. It doesn’t effect the deal with the conference itself.

“As of right now, that is something that Oklahoma State will not do at this point. Should we need something like that, we believe we have other avenues or levers we could pull first before that. But again, I applaud the commissioner for making those options available to us.”

Weiberg and Hunziker also got into some other financial matters, like the report last week that the Big Ten distributed a record $1.37 billion to its 18 members in the 2024-25 fiscal year — a jump of about $500 million. The SEC announced in February that it had distributed more than $1 billion to its 16 members for the fiscal year.

So, dividing that up, that’s about $76 million on average for each Big Ten school and about $62.5 million for each SEC school.

The Big 12 hasn’t announced its allocations yet, but Weiberg said he expects the average Big 12 distribution to come in “north of $35 million.”

“That’s a wide discrepancy,” Weiberg said. “It’s a wider discrepancy than we’ve ever seen in the history of college athletics.”

To try to level that playing field as much as possible, Weiberg said OSU has asked all of its programs to cut expenses by 10%, OSU has increased ticket prices and the Boys From Oklahoma concerts have also helped with that.

It’s an uphill battle, but Weiberg noted that OSU has had to compete with the likes of Texas, one of the highest-funded athletic departments in the country, for years.

“There’s a bigger discrepancy now between what some conferences are getting and what others are than there ever has been before,” Weiberg said. “So, that presents unique challenges in terms of just the level playing field. At the end of the day, when you’re in a competition, part of what makes the competition interesting is when you’re trying to compete on a level playing field. Now, I say that acknowledging that there’s never an exactly level playing field — I don’t care if its the NFL or Major League Baseball or whatever, there’s not that. But I think to keep it interesting, there needs to be some version of a level playing field, and that’s getting very tilted in this environment.

“We’ve competed before. We’ve never been the highest-resourced institution in our conference or in the country or anything like that, and we’ve competed at a very high level in all of our sports, from football through all the other sports. Obviously the 55 national championships are a great indicator of that.”