Ad Disclosure
The opening weekend of the 2025 NCAA Tournament is not one that many SEC baseball fans will want to remember. A total of 13 SEC teams took the field, 8 as regional hosts.
When the 64 teams had been pared to 16, only 4 survived, 2 of which will play each other in the super regionals, so no more than 3 SEC teams will end up in Omaha.
For an SEC that looked like arguably the toughest conference in the history of college baseball, the opening NCAA weekend was a massive slice of humble pie. Vanderbilt? Texas? Georgia? Not so fast. The fighting Racers of Murray State are going to the super regionals, while the host Ole Miss Rebels lost to them twice.
This was a week slotted for pondering just how many SEC members would end up in Omaha. Instead, we’re pondering which league members have the most disappointed fan base. Welcome to the SEC baseball disappointment meter. Let’s hope we don’t need to bust it out again soon.
Preemptive Disappointment Club
Texas A&M obviously didn’t have to actually make the NCAA Tournament to deliver a horrifically disappointing season. South Carolina and Missouri are also exempted from the weekend’s disappointment because they’d already disappointed enough fans to miss the NCAA Tournament.
Definitely not a disappointment
LSU, Tennessee, Arkansas and Auburn are now excused from class. They can go watch their highlight films while the ugly grades get handed out… well, that and prepare for the super regionals.
Typically Disappointing
For Mississippi State and Kentucky, their disappointments fold neatly into disappointing seasons.
Mississippi State fired Chris Lemonis in mid-season and then limped to a No. 3 seed in the Tallahassee Regional. The Bulldogs took care of No. 2 seed Northeastern twice, but couldn’t outlast Florida State. No particular shame there, and the Bulldogs were probably well prepared to get on to the offseason and the next phase of Mississippi State baseball as the Brian O’Connor era begins.
Kentucky went a 180-degree turn from being one of the best small-ball/fundamentals and details teams in the nation in last year’s trip to Omaha to one of the worst this season. This Kentucky team hemorrhaged leads left and right and ran its way out of a fair number of games. Kentucky had already lost 10 games on the year by 1 run. Losing 2 more to West Virginia finished off an ugly season.
Not Altogether Unexpected Disappointing
Oklahoma and Florida both rest here — teams that had some ups, but also some downs that made this fate plausible.
Start with the Sooners. Their NCAA situation kind of mirrored their season. They beat up on bad teams and couldn’t overcome good ones. OU took down No. 3 seed Nebraska twice, but lost 2 of 3 to top ACC seed North Carolina. The Tar Heels are legitimate and taking them to a third game before losing isn’t exactly underachieving, even if it was a bit disappointing.
Florida looked to have found its mojo after a 1-11 start in SEC play, but in the end, the pitching issues that throttled the Gators early resurfaced late and doomed the regional. Losing 11-6 and 11-4 to East Carolina left the Gators not even playing regional winner Coastal Carolina. The UF experience will probably be more remembered for Kevin O’Sullivan’s profane tirade before Saturday’s game. At least Sully showed more fire than his players.
More than Mildly Disappointing
Alabama gets a special category, because as a No. 2 seed, losing isn’t exactly a shocking situation. But seeing a potent offensive team — one that scored 10 runs in defeat in Hoover — struggle to put up runs was a bit baffling. Losing to Miami and Southern Miss isn’t one of the most shocking outcomes of the SECs week. But those 5-3 and 6-5 scores raised more than a few eyebrows.
“What the %^& Was That?” Disappointment
There are your seats, Vanderbilt, Texas, Georgia, Ole Miss. Let’s have a nice long chat.
Georgia is probably the least shocking of the shocking. Duke was a quality opponent, and Georgia fell into the age-old trap of having a great offensive game right out of the chute. Scoring 20 runs in Game 1 is a sure way to get out-pitched in Game 2. Why baseball functions this way is a question without a reasonable answer, but it is indeed so and the 6-3 loss to Duke after the 20-4 win proved it again. The pitching staff sloughed away an 11-9 loss to Oklahoma State to end the season. Georgia sits at 13th in the SEC in ERA. When most of the homers that UGA hits are solo homers, that won’t get by against good competition. It didn’t for Georgia.
Vandy, Texas, Ole Miss, wow.
Vanderbilt was lucky to be losing to Wright State on Sunday at all. It took a fairly shaky on-field umpire reversal to get through a first 4-3 win over Wright State on Friday. The Commodore bats went utterly silent, putting up 10 runs in 3 games. The last 2 games yielded a double and a solo homer combined. Pitching and a few timely hits can work great, but only as long as the timely hits actually come. Vanderbilt had lost 3 1-run games all year and then lost 2 in a weekend.
Texas has the whole regional disappointment thing. If everything is bigger in Texas, so is the rupturing of a thousand egos after those plucky UT-San Antonio Road Runners proved themselves the best team in the state. Texas blew a 6-1 lead and then put itself in a 7-0 hole against UTSA in its 2 upset losses. Suffice it to say that the Texas squad that went 6-9 in May didn’t look much like the one that played the rest of the season. But in-state shame is a nasty sting atop blowing the No. 2 overall seed.
Ole Miss is in a class of its own. Not only did the Rebels lose twice to the No. 4 seed in their region, but in doing so, they allowed their opponent to actually outflank its entire NCAA Tournament history of wins (Murray State had won 2 NCAA Tournament games ever coming in, both in 1979). Beating Murray 19-8 on Sunday only demonstrated how easy this series probably should have been. But in true tortoise and hare fashion, the Rebels fell down 12-3 in the decisive game only to rally to within 12-11. And to lose 12-11. Hunter Elliott standing on the field crying after the loss reminded fans that, yes, he actually is on Ole Miss’s team. Watching him blow through Murray’s lineup in a random ninth inning cameo only confirmed how underused he was in his 7 innings of 1-run pitching.
Joe Cox is a columnist for Saturday Down South. He has also written or assisted in writing five books, and his most recent, Almost Perfect (a study of baseball pitchers’ near-miss attempts at perfect games), is available on Amazon or at many local bookstores.
