The SEC Forum at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Unfortunately Texas keeps getting time slots that make it hard to watch.  Either too late, or too early on a work day.  

I've discovered that Sling--at least on this limited day-pass plan I got--only allows viewing from one device at a time.  While I could probably watch UT on the side this afternoon from work, Mrs. DeT gets home around 3:30 and will be watching on delay.  Meaning I can't watch.  We could both wait til tonight, but I'll be watching UGA/OU.  

The first game against UGA didn't start until 8, and she doesn't last past 9:30, tops, so she missed a fair bit of that one.  Though after the first inning, I think she was okay not putting herself through more.  

Ole Miss has the ignominious distinction of being the 2&Q team from their bracket, as the only SEC school.  Way to represent, idgits.  

I'm no baseball guru, but I guess the adage of "good pitching beats good hitting" still is reasonably true over the aggregate.
That is, in order to be a contender, you're going to need 2-3 starters you absolutely can depend on. It's unlikely you're winning championships if 13-9 is the score of most of your games, you're probably not winning a trophy. You're bound to run into a guy that will keep that in the 3-4 run range. You'll need arms to match it.

Texas has like 1 1/2 reliable pitchers, and our 1 reliable one was (a) not that reliable and (b) a victim of hilariously ill times defensive miscues. That said, 7-1 or 3-1 is still a loss. If Texas couldn't get more than 1 run (and that aided by UGA mistakes), they weren't winning even if Volantis were brilliant.

Texas' #6 ranking is probably about right.

Yup.  A good but not great team and one I never felt was destined to win the NC.

Still, finishing #2 in the SEC regular season and getting to Omaha is a pretty good season.  I'd love to NOT be the 2&Q team from our side, but I don't have faith in any of our remaining pitching.  We started our best, and he wasn't good enough.

This is okay for year2 under a new coach, but his job is to assemble the roster that doesn't have mediocre arms, and doesn't have super-timid hitting at the worst time.  He has the resources to spend as much as any other college baseball program out there, so there are no excuses for having a weaker roster than our opponents.  Next year needs to be better.

Recruiting college baseball, even with NIL, has to be really weird. I mean, you can go directly from high school to being a mega-paid player (usually pitcher) in the MLB system. They have the money to fund even a reasonably likely prospect at a level that collegiate NIL just can't touch. Spend all your time convincing great talent to attend your school and play for your team - then watch them all accept their draft slot paycheck and not show up.

Seems like you gotta recruit good-but-not-great talent, then learn to improve them. From what I gather, Texas has a couple of coaches in Tulo and Weiner that do just that.

I always thought Paul Mainieri really struggled with that.  He spent a lot of effort recruiting and signing guys who never made it to campus because the Braves AA club was a better deal.  Good recruiters expect that kind of thing, of course, and ideally plan accordingly.  He wasn't bad at it, but it seemed like a lot of his years included a lot of pitching staffs that were good but not great because he put so much emphasis on signing a couple of aces he was counting on who never dressed out for us.  

One. 

And that was relatively early on, his third year with us, I think.

Particularly over the back half of his time with us, we struggled with complete staffs because he put so many eggs in the baskets of kids who everybody knew were draft risks.  Everybody but him, I guess. 

I don't mean to say he was a bad coach, but he whiffed on a higher number of recruits than our other coaches in my lifetime, because he was enamored with kids who were just never going to step foot on campus.  Johnson inherited a mess of a pitching roster, and he's done much better.  Granted, we're in the portal/NIL era now, so it's probably apples and oranges.  But he goes after guys we can actually get.  Other than this, his 5th year--which still wasn't that bad--our pitching depth has beefed up. 

We're 6th in all-time CWS appearances.  If we make another one before USC, Ok. St., Arizona or Stanford get 1 or 2 more, we'll move into the Top 5 list.  Two more appearances for Top 4.  We'd need 5 more appearances to move to #2 to tie with Miami (and of course Miami would have to not gain more).  Texas is so laughably ahead of the rest of the field that if we ever did get #1, it won't be in my lifetime. 

In the 40 years since our first appearance, we've gone 20 times, averaging every other year.  Or--removing Smoke Laval's years--an actual bum--even better than that for the other years.  Obviously you can't cherry pick the worst years out, but 1) I like to imagine a world where Smoke wasn't our coach, and 2) it's interesting to note that even with a guy who didn't make Omaha much, the % of appearances is still so high across a time-span that includes him.  

The CWS began in 1947, and in that 79 years, Texas has 39 appearances, ~half the time there's been a CWS.  That includes a remarkable 7 appearances in both the 60's and then again in the 80's. 

There's no question LSU is the most accomplished program of the last 40 years.  But there's also no question that the total span of history is dominated by Texas, to the point where they would have to fall of the map for literally multiple decades, while one of the other closest teams continued to roll (it can't just be any team).  Actually, it could really only be USC, and to a lesser extent, Ok. St., 'Zona and 'Furd.  The others with a ballpark number of appearances to that first group, like FSU, Miami, and ASU, started so much later than Texas that they wind up falling into the same bucket as LSU.....great history, but nowhere near as early as Texas.

Depending on how much one weights titles, that will affect how much you offset the difference in number of CWS appearances between USC and Texas.  Texas has 18 more CWS appearances than USC.  But USC's staggering 12 titles.....damn.  They won the whole thing more than half the years they made it.  For comparison, LSU's .638 win% in the CWS is amazing.  And it's still dwarfed by USC's incredible .740 win%.  That's insane. 

Miami, who didn't make the CWS until 1974 and is second behind Texas with 25 appearances, has 4 titles to show for it.  FSU, who is in third place with 24 appearances and has been going since the 1950's, has 0 titles.  Lolz.   

UNC is #14 on the list with 12 appearances, starting in 1960.  That shows how quick and steep the dropoff is from teams in the Top 5.  They also have 0 titles.  

And I'm hoping they don't pick up their first this year.