Before arriving at Mississippi State, Chris Lemonis, who was recruiting coordinator at Louisville and head coach at Indiana, thought the SEC was overhyped as a college baseball conference. That quickly changed once he became the head Diamond Dog.

“My first year in the SEC, and I probably recruited against it for 24, 25 years, and I’d always (thought) ‘oh, it’s just a bunch of — a couple good teams or whatever it is,’ and then when you go through it as a coach, I think the second day on the job, they handed me the schedule, and when you look and you go to Arkansas and you go to Mississippi, you start — it gives you a headache thinking of all the teams that you have to play,” Lemonis recalled at Friday’s College World Series press conference in Omaha.

The quote was in response to a question about the toughness of playing in the SEC, which grabbed half the spots in the eight-team CWS. He agreed with Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin that playing in the conference is extremely difficult, but ultimately helpful.

“And in our world, it was fun, but it was also — it’s a gauntlet is what we’ve called it in our clubhouse,” Lemonis added. “It does, like Tim said, it hardens your kids. You play in great environments. You have some real highs and you have some real lows because in our league it’s not over until the last out, so you’re hanging on all the time trying to get that last out in these great environments. But I think it makes us better at the end, and our group is definitely better at the end because of the experiences we’ve had playing in the SEC.”