FORT WORTH, Texas – Following the Kansas City Outlaws’ last game of the 2024 PBR Camping World Team Series regular season, head coach J.W. Hart returned to the locker room to reconvene with his team.

He’d barely taken a step into the room before he was scrambling out of it again, dodging the cooler full of ice water dumped on him.

The Outlaws had just clinched the regular-season championship, and the evidence was splashed all over the hallway floor of Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Arizona.

A year after falling short of the regular-season title by one game to the Austin Gamblers, the Outlaws snatched the No. 1 spot from the Carolina Cowboys as the two squads played each other to end their seasons. The Outlaws left no doubt, taking down the Cowboys 264.5-0.

“That’s what so cool about any sport,” Hart said after attempting to help arena workers mop up the puddle he was standing in. “When it comes down to the last game, and it’s down to the last two teams, and the winner wins it, that’s what sports is about. That’s what’s so cool about it. And to have the opportunity to be in that mix with Carolina – to say, ‘If you all win, you’re the champs. If we win, we’re the champs’ – there’s something special about that. And to hold your own destiny in your own hands and not have to worry about another team winning or losing to move somebody for you is truly special. And just to get the high end of it, to come out on top of it, is just icing on the cake, really.”

If first impressions are to be believed, the Outlaws winning the season comes as a surprise. They were 5-4 through the first month of the season, surprisingly average after pushing the Gamblers to the brink the season earlier.

The Cowboys, on the other hand, began the season 10-0-1 and looked to be the unquestionable leaders of the pack.

And they were. But then the Outlaws got going and spent the rest of the season chipping away at the Cowboys’ lead.

Since Stampede Days in Nashville on Aug. 16-18, the Outlaws are 14-5. The Cowboys, on the other hand, are 8-9 since their dominant start.

“I think it just took us a couple (events to get rolling), because the team that we had now is what we felt like we started with,” Hart said. “Our training camps going into the season were a little later than we wanted. A couple of guys were late getting here from Brazil, getting visa stuff worked out. And getting guys up to game speed – Brennon (Eldred) had been off for a couple of years, so getting him up to speed. But we felt like we could do it on day one, and we just didn’t. But shortly thereafter, we felt like we got our ducks in a row and our powder dry.”

They certainly did. The Outlaws finished the season with an aggregate of 6,329.25 points (and a 52% riding percentage) – a whopping 582.5 points ahead of the Florida Freedom, which has the second-highest aggregate, and more than double the aggregate of the No. 10 New York Mavericks.

But the target became the Cowboys, who seized the No. 1 ranking at the first event of the season and never looked back.

“It kind of got in our minds mid-season that they were our focus,” Hart admitted. “And we made mental mistakes of worrying about them and not worrying about our job.”

But, in the final push to the end of the season, things changed.

“I tell you on my family and on a stack of bibles this deep, the last four weeks, we have not focused on what they’ve done or who had to beat them to help us or lose to help us,” Hart said. “We’ve literally just concentrated on our bulls, our game, and the only reason I would’ve known we were even this close and had a shot is because people come ask.”

That mindset, Hart says, is perhaps the most important piece that fell into place for the Outlaws this season. If you ask him about last season, he shrugs. The past is simply not important enough to think about.

“We’ve been focused so much on our next game,” Hart said. “We truly found a place where we didn’t live with a loss behind us, and we didn’t live with a win behind us. We actually forgot what we did yesterday and forged through tomorrow, and it had to be the single biggest change we made, is to not focus on yesterday.”

Here on PBR.com, we’ll focus on yesterday for a brief moment longer.

The Outlaws went 2-0 at Ridge Rider Days this past weekend to conclude their season, going a combined 8-for-12 (66.7%) in two games and two shootout rounds.

While 2024 World Champion Cassio Dias has been a huge difference-maker, he can’t do all that alone. In fact, he wasn’t even the Outlaw with the highest finish in the MVP race. That was Sandro Batista, who finished third (22-for-33, 66%) to Dias’s fifth (20-for-34, 58%).

“Of course, he’s our pivot spot,” Hart said of Dias. “We put him on the bulls that we get the big scores, but it’s truly – Brennon’s coming off a couple-year layoff, and he’s contributed to when we rode four bulls. He’s contributed and been the winning factor a couple of times. Maikon Calixto (Rocha) has been the winning factor. Heitor (Goiano) has been the winning factor. Sandro is the winning factor. You can point at any one of them guys in the locker room and go, ‘On that game that day, that guy’s the one who really won that game for us.’ Every one of them holds that in their hand, and that’s the biggest key. Knock on wood and thank the Lord, we’re deep. We’re as deep as or deeper than anybody with our talent pool.”

Thanks to their incredible, season-ending win, the Outlaws are the No. 1 seed at the 2024 PBR Camping World Team Series Championship on Oct. 18-20 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. They’ll have to wait to see who they match up against on Oct. 19 based on the results of the Ride-In Round on Oct. 17 and Round 1 of competition on Oct. 18.

Hart may not like thinking about the past, but in Las Vegas last year, the Outlaws also went in with a bye and went out in fifth place.

“You’ve got to learn from wins and losses, and I think we learned something last year about going in maybe with too much confidence,” Hart said. “But we had a young team that had never seen the lights like that. And we’ve got guys that’s not seen them like that this year, but that’s not going to happen again.”

For now, the Outlaws will leave their big win in the past – just as they have all season.

“Just like not paying attention and thinking about the losses in the past, tomorrow, we’ll forget about today,” Hart said. “We’re going to get back to camp and try to erase all the good memories, as well as the bad, and focus on what we’ve got to do. We read the bible verse that says, when you put your hands on the plow, if you look back, God won’t reward you. So, we’re going to put our hands on the plow, we’re going to keep going forward, and we’re not looking behind us, good or bad.”

Photo courtesy of Bull Stock Media