The Rebels are in Omaha right now, as I write this. They flew out yesterday. Hotty Toddy!
Getting to Omaha and playing into June is far-and-away my favorite sporting event; I just like baseball so much more than any other sport. The college game, in particular, has this unique feature of playing fewer games than just about any other organized baseball league, and it is just about enough games to truly evaluate the quality of a team, and I really love that about it because it makes the post season truly interesting. Ole Miss this year went 36-21 in the regular season, going an even .500 15-15 in league play. The Rebels lost in the first game of the league tournament, but they were invited to the regional in Lincoln, Nebraska, where they won three straight games, Arizona State, Nebraska, Arizona State, then they played the super regional at Auburn, Alabama, besting the Tigers in two-straight. So, the Rebels are sitting at 41-21 headed to Omaha to take on the North Carolina Tarheels, a team that brings a 50-12-1 record, having defeated USC at the Chapel Hill regional in three games. And, you might look at that record difference and think that the Tarheels have an advantage over the Rebels, and you would be wrong. In college baseball, teams can “get hot”, and Ole Miss is hot right now. Carolina has been to Omaha 13 times, but it has never won the national title. Ole Miss has been to Omaha 7 times, and it won the national title the last time it was there, in 2022. You can essentially throw out the records at this point. The winner of the tournament is anybody’s guess.
That 2022 title run is one of my favorite things ever. I was so much fun. I don’t know exactly, but there’s something about it being in the middle of the summer, and there’s something about the format. It is a double-elimination tournament played with eight teams. Ole Miss has North Carolina, Troy, and West Virginia in its bracket. The other bracket includes Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Alabama, an all-SEC bracket, which is crazy (though I still dislike Oklahoma and Texas being in the SEC at all, but I digress). The winner of Ole Miss/North Carolina will play the winner of Troy/West Virgina, and the losers will play each other, with one team getting eliminated. The threat of elimination is what makes this tournament so interesting to me, I think, because after a team takes its first loss, the stakes go up. It’s just a lot of fun.
Interestingly, Ole Miss has one player on this team from the 2022 championship team, pitcher Hunter Elliott. Elliott was actually my favorite player on that team, and he was critical to its success. He was a freshman sensation, and he pitched well, but in particular, he has this sly pick-off move to first, and he got a couple of outs with it that always struck me as absolutely critical to the Rebs winning it all, that in a championship run, there will be these critical outs, and those pick-offs were exactly that, but they aren’t the kind of outs that get write-ups. The next year, Ole Miss tanked pretty hard and turned in a losing record, and a lot of that had to do with its pitching staff getting depleted. Elliott pitched in one or two games before he had to get Tommy Johns surgery, which pretty much sat him out for two seasons. Now he is on his last year of eligibility and I tell everybody that he’s the lucky piece to the puzzle, to bet it all on Ole Miss to win it all, because Hunter is back in Omaha.
That would be cool.
Let’s make a run, Rebels.