There wasn't a lot of madness this past week in college softball, with most of the losses suffered by ranked teams coming at the hands of other ranked teams (notably Florida taking two of three at Alabama), but credit to Troy for getting into the spirit of things. Facing a week of potential misery, with four games against top-10 opponents, the Sun Belt team first upset Florida State in extra innings and then took one of three games against conference superpower Louisiana-Lafayette.

If you missed that or some of the other highlights of the softball week, read on.

1. Hail to the victors

Michigan football fans should dare to dream that new coach Jim Harbaugh finds someone who bedevils archrival Ohio State to the degree that Sierra Romero continues to on the softball diamond.

The Buckeyes didn't have any answers for the Wolverines, plural, this past weekend. Michigan outscored Ohio State 46-2 in sweeping an embarrassingly one-sided series. That makes the tally between the two a numerically adroit 99-9 in nine regular-season games since Romero arrived in Ann Arbor (including the Big Ten tournament, she's 10-0 against the Buckeyes). So a lot of people produced runs, but Exhibit A, as she so often is, would be the All-American infielder, now primarily at second base.

Romero, who began last week by hitting a home run in a midweek game against Bowling Green, came to the plate 12 times against the Buckeyes. Seven times in the series she walked, once intentionally and three times without taking a strike from pitchers who likely wanted no part of her. In the five at-bats when Ohio State tempted fate by letting her put the ball in play, she hit two home runs. For the series, she drove in six runs and scored eight. Now hitting .522 with a 1.145 slugging percentage and 38 walks against just four strikeouts, Romero remains a hitting marvel. Pitch to her, don't pitch to her. You lose.

Speaking of Harbaugh, Michigan fans should also hope he has half the legacy of Carol Hutchins, who with the sweep of Ohio State became the third coach to reach 1,400 wins, and the second this season after Arizona legend Mike Candrea got there a couple of weeks ago. Both Candrea and Hutchins should pass former Fresno State coach Margie Wright next season, and it's tough to imagine either walking away sooner rather than later.

2. Miranda Kramer shuts down Tennessee

In about a week, National Pro Fastpitch will hold its annual college draft in Nashville, Tennessee. With the addition of a fifth team in the league this season, the Dallas Charge, the always in-demand commodity that is pitching will be still more precious. So it would behoove those making plans for picks to take a close look at what happened a couple of hours east of the Music City in Knoxville this past Wednesday. That's where Western Kentucky senior Miranda Kramer shut down and shut out Tennessee. Kramer allowed just two hits and struck out 14 batters in a complete game. Shortly thereafter, those same Lady Vols unloaded 30 runs to take two of three games from Missouri in an SEC series in Knoxville.

Big-time college programs may have overlooked Miranda Kramer, but National Pro Fastpitch teams shouldn't make the same mistake. Courtesy Western Kentucky

For her part, Kramer moved on to a weekend series at Ball State and again allowed just two hits, this time with 16 strikeouts, to win her lone start against the Cardinals. A transfer from IPFW who is in her first and only season at Western Kentucky, a season unfortunately truncated by a rash of weather cancelations early, she has a 1.23 ERA in 15 starts and 176 strikeouts in just 91 1/3 innings. The NCAA active leader in both total strikeouts and strikeouts per seven innings, she currently ranks 13th all-time in the latter category -- one spot ahead of Keilani Ricketts.

Bigger schools missed on Kramer's potential when she came out of high school in Iowa. USA Softball, still in search of security in the circle this generation, has ample time to reconsider but has thus far missed on including her in its tryout process. The first round of the NPF draft shouldn't conclude without someone finally getting out ahead of the curve on Kramer.

3. Hey, look, more LSU

When you play in what looks again this season like the deepest conference in the country, what better way to spend the rare weekend without an SEC opponent than by playing a pair of games against Oklahoma?

So much for taking it easy between road trips to Florida and Kentucky.

A week after a memorable series at Florida that was largely dominated by offense, on both sides in the case of the swing game that went LSU's way 14-10, the pitching staff of the nation's No. 1 team resumed its increasingly familiar control of the proceedings. As discussed a week ago, led by Lauren Chamberlain and Shelby Pendley but supported from the top to the bottom of the lineup, Oklahoma had been scoring runs at a ridiculous rate. In two games against LSU redshirt freshman Carley Hoover and true freshman Allie Walljasper, the Sooners managed just seven hits and two earned runs.

Outscoring the Gators one weekend and shutting down the Sooners the next is about as impressive a two-week stretch as a team is likely to have this season.

4. Chelsea Ponce the first to 20

At some point in the years to come, Chelsea Ponce will be able to tell her daughter, Faith, that no pitcher in the entire country got to 20 wins more quickly than her mom during the 2015 season. And like children everywhere, Faith will presumably roll her eyes and stop listening. In her first Division I season, the latest step on a path that included time at Riverside City College, a redshirt season at UC Riverside and the birth of her daughter, Ponce is the ace of a team quietly in the midst of big turnaround.

A season after finishing 23-31, the Highlanders are 28-7. They had a winning record entering Big West play a season ago, too, but 21 games over .500 is entirely new territory (the program's previous best win total for an entire Division I season was 25). Make no mistake, UC Riverside's early success is in large part the product of runs -- led by Haley Harris, three hitters top .900 in OPS. But as both beneficiary and enabler, Ponce has been the constant in the circle. She won four games this past weekend and picked up a save in UC Riverside's other game. All told, she worked 25 2/3 innings, allowed six hits and one earned run and struck out 25 batters. That included a no-hitter against Bethune-Cookman.

5. Oregon State's welcome return

We're still a week away from what shapes up as the series of the year in the Pac-12, when UCLA hosts Oregon for three games beginning April 3. The Bruins and Ducks look like the class of the league and its best bets for representation in Oklahoma City. And with Michigan, Oklahoma, Louisiana-Lafayette and the SEC heavyweights crowding the picture for the top eight seeds in the NCAA tournament, and the corresponding right to host super regionals, it's never too early to get a leg up on home-field advantage.

But in the meantime, which is the league's third-best team makes for a fascinating study. Given its lineup, which scored 43 runs in four games out of conference this past weekend, Arizona seems the favorite in that demolition derby, but its pitching isn't likely to stop being a question mark. Arizona State, Cal and Washington are right there, too.

Oregon State might seem a stretch in the conversation, even after sweeping its first conference series in nearly two years by taking three from Stanford this past weekend, but its chances look better than they did two weeks ago. Natalie Hampton started all three games in the Stanford series and went 4-for-8 with three walks, hit a home run and a double and drove in five runs. This was just the second weekend back in the starting lineup for Hampton, who missed all of 2014 with an injury after hitting 15 home runs and driving in 50 runs, a school record, as a freshman the season before.

Every team in the race for third has flaws. With Hampton back in the lineup alongside Dani Gilmore, Oregon State also has assets.