Ole Miss is the No. 1 team in college baseball
Some baseball thoughts as conference play arrives, the Will Wade saga at LSU and rain-soaked Players Championship
What a busy weekend in sports it was. We’ve got a new podcast out with Collin Brister on Ole Miss taking two against Oral Roberts, the revamped rotation, bullpen roles forming and how this team shapes up compared to the rest of the SEC as league play begins on Thursday. You can check that out here or anywhere you get podcasts.
We’ve got much of the same and a lot more to discuss today.
Rebels take two from ORU, earn No. 1 ranking
Ole Miss is the No. 1 team in the country according to D1 Baseball’s latest poll that dropped on Monday morning. The Rebels took two of three from Oral Roberts, dropping back end of a seven-inning double header on Sunday afternoon. Some thoughts from the weekend:
Gaddis labors but delivers quality start
John Gaddis made his Friday “night” debut in game one. We covered a some of this in Friday afternoon’s newsletter, but I will reiterate that I am not sure you can take a ton from this. Gaddis seemed to struggle with fastball command early on in the game, which led to a trio of walks and a handful of mistakes. Gaddis relies heavily on being able to locate his fastball anywhere he wants. It is arguably his greatest strength as a pitcher and why he rarely walks hitters. He didn’t have that on Friday. It happens. His ability to trudge onward and give Ole Miss five innings of two-run baseball despite not having his best stuff is the sign of a veteran pitcher.
Maybe that was Mike Bianco’s thinking when he moved Gaddis to Friday. I made the case for Jack Dougherty on Friday nights in last week’s Tuesday newsletter, but I now think that was a touch premature. We can get to Dougherty struggling in a minute, but maybe Bianco looks at Gaddis, Derek Diamond, Drew McDaniel and the (now) three starts in Dougherty’s career and believes that Gaddis can produce the most consistent results — that he’s the guy least likely to allow a one-out walk to turn into a four-running inning on a night in which runs will be at more of a premium than the other two days. Maybe it still shakes out the way I outlined. I am just rethinking it a bit and believe I maybe jumped the gun when it comes to Dougherty on Fridays.
Derek Diamond was strong in short outing
Derek Diamond looked really sharp on Sunday. I thought it was the best he looked all year. The fastball stayed in the 90s (something it hadn’t done in his other starts) and he had pretty good command of it. Diamond threw 42 strikes in 55 total pitches. He allowed one hit, struck out five and did not walk anyone. Bianco pulled Diamond after four innings, which I think has to be due to the Rebels having a short week upcoming with the Auburn series being a Thursday-Saturday series. I would guess Bianco would like to have seen Diamond extend later in the game to see how he handled things the second and third time through the batting order, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to sacrifice Diamond being fresh for SEC play just to see how he would handle being extended.
I get the feeling Diamond is about to become a fascinating character in the larger story of this 2022 Ole Miss Baseball team. He had a tough outing at UCF and was pulled off the Friday night role, but it’s not like he’s been terrible so far this season. This is just a personal observation, but it seems Diamond has been criticized more for what he isn’t rather than appreciated for what he is throughout his Ole Miss career. And I get that. His career has had more ‘failure’ than triumph to this point. What Diamond showed against Texas on opening weekend last year in Arlington was that of a future Friday night anchor of a pitching staff — only to be pulled from the rotation six weeks later. This year, Diamond was anointed the Friday starter sort of by default, and while that likely won’t end up being his role at Ole Miss, he’s still got more than enough talent and ability to be a dependable weekend starter for this team. Now that the pressure of being the Friday guy is gone, he’s got an opportunity to prove that.
I am curious to see what this version of Diamond does on Saturdays in SEC play.
Dougherty labors in first weekend start
Jack Doughtery struggled in the finale that Ole Miss lost 8-4. He entered this start with 12 strikeouts and no walks in two relief appearances that spanned five innings. This time out, he walked a guy and hit another in the first inning but danced around it. A bases loaded jam in the the third inning proved to be Dougherty’s demise, despite thinking he’d escaped that too. He gave up three straight singles after a pop up to start the frame. Dougherty then induced a sharply-hit ball to Peyton Chatagnier that seemingly turned into an inning-ending double play. But upon review, the runner beat the throw and a run crossed the plate. Dougherty gave up a three-run bomb to the next hitter and was replaced by Hunter Elliott.
I don’t know that I make a ton of this outing on its own. Dougherty was lights out in his other two appearances. He also hadn’t pitched in 11 days, and the two outings he did have coming into this one were nine days apart. He hasn’t pitched a ton this year and hasn’t really been on a regular schedule yet in his Ole Miss career. Is that why he struggled on Sunday? I am not sure. I just want to see him make another start or two before forming an opinion about whether he is better used as a bullpen arm or a starter. He’s got three starts now in his career. One of those was rain-shortened in the final game of the regional last year against Southern Miss. I’d like to see a larger sample size.
The bullpen was just ‘okay'
I thought a couple of the bullpen outings on Sunday were sort of emblematic of how the staff pitched as a whole on the weekend: decent, but not the sharpest. Hunter Elliott made a decent pitch in the fifth inning of the finale that resulted in a solo shot that gave Oral Roberts a 5-4 lead after Ole Miss had scored four in the bottom of the fourth to tie the game. Riley Maddox made a couple of mistakes, and got squeezed on a strike call or two that contributed to the three runs he allowed in the sixth inning. Dylan Delucia fell victim to some soft contact. He also lost a couple of hitters when he was ahead in the count.
But there was some good like Diamond's start and Brandon Johnson escaping a jam in the second game (though he made it a little harder on himself than it needed to be). There was good and bad, and it made for an average weekend. If you are noticing a theme here, I don’t think anything that happened changes my thinking on what some of these bullpen roles could end up being.
Some offensive numbers
While Ole Miss wasn’t particularly great at the plate on Sunday, it still had a pretty monster week. The Rebels scored 42 runs in 27 offensive innings and have scored 51 runs in 36 frames since Kevin Graham exited the lineup with an injury. Yes, this lineup is deep.
Ole Miss has drawn 90 walks and has struck out 93 times thru 15 games. A one-to-one ratio this far into a season is pretty remarkable. That’s another thing that is entertaining about watching this lineup hit: they very rarely swing at bad pitches. Watch Dunhurst, Gonzalez and Elko in particular. The plate discipline is high-level stuff. It goes beyond those three and it’s pretty strong 1-9 on any given day, no matter who is in the lineup.
Reagan Burford is now hitting .407 with a 1.092 OPS.
Injury note: Harris out with midsection strain
Calvin Harris was out of the lineup all weekend. Bianco said after the Friday game that Harris suffered a midsection strain and that he was unable to hit or play the field. This is something to keep an eye on. Harris was having a terrific start to the season and with Graham out and Dunhurst having already missed time this year, Ole Miss doesn’t need anyone else on the shelf.
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LSU fires Will Wade
Four days after it was reported that LSU had received its notice of allegations from the NCAA in the midst of an ongoing investigation into the school’s football and men’s basketball programs, the Tigers fired head basketball coach Will Wade. It was the end of a three-year saga that consisted of most of us wondering how in the hell Wade was able to keep his job for so long. Three years and two days prior to his firing on Saturday, a report surfaced that Wade was caught on an FBI wiretap discussing a “strong-ass offer,” he and the Tigers program made to Javonte Smart in 2017.
In the recording, Wade is talking to sports agent Christian Dawkins, who is currently in federal prison after being convicted by the FBI’s Southern District of New York of bribery and fraud. This all stemmed from a 2018 announcement that the FBI planned to arrest of 10 individuals, ranging from agents, assistant coaches and Adidas and Nike officials on various bribery, corruption and fraud charges as part of a wide-ranging investigation into the underbelly of the college basketball recruiting world.
If you were previously unaware of all of this, you can spend days and weeks reading about that investigation, its reach and the impact it had on college basketball and the slimy world of apparel companies and agents steering kids to specific schools. But the point is that Wade was caught on a federal wiretap discussing recruiting violations, was briefly suspended (only once the recording became public) only to be reinstated and spent the last two years operating as LSU’s head coach like nothing had ever happened. He even earned the nickname Wiretap Will, all the while thumbing his nose at the NCAA as he continued to sign 5-star prospects and built LSU into a winner.
If you find the prospect of Wade continuing to coach despite being caught on an FBI wiretap discussing a monetary offer to a player utterly insane, welcome to the rest of the world following this story for the last two years. Now, I imagine most of you are like me in that:
You weren’t born yesterday.
You aren’t surprise, nor do you care, that college athletes are paid (this was pre-Name, Image and Likeness era. It’s weird to have that as a preface).
Even with all of that said, it was still utterly wild to watch this story unfold with Wade remaining on the sideline for two more seasons. But this story finally reached a predictable end, even if we all wondered if anything would ever actually happen and whether Wade could actually end up skating on all of this. My good pal Brody Miller covers LSU for The Athletic. He wrote a terrifically reported story on the sanctions Wade and LSU faced.
I won’t spoil the contents of the story, but the information is out there whether you subscribe to The Athletic or not. Of the eight Level I violations (the most serious kind of infraction), Wade is directly named in five of them. A brief overview of what they entail:
Paying hush money to the fiancé of a former LSU athlete who threatened to talk about impermissible benefits.
Using a joint bank account in his wife’s name to pay recruits and people in recruits’ inner circles to be unofficial recruiters for LSU.
The Javonte Smart payments that included a job for someone associated with Smart.
Paying another recruit and his family $300,000, offering them jobs and assurance of travel visas.
Providing false and misleading information to NCAA investigators and not cooperating with the investigation.
If you are one of the last remaining, rock-dwelling people that believed in the concept of amateur athletics and that the urban legends of high dollar amounts to athletes was exaggerated, I rest my case. Oh, and that is not to mention part of this where the football program is tied into this investigation because it is accused of using money laundered through a children’s hospital to pay players. Anyway, that’s not the point.
Realistically, there was no way Wade was ever coming out of this unscathed. LSU likely knew it too. That’s why former athletic director Joe Alleva restructured Wade’s contract in 2019 that allowed the school to fire Wade with cause if he was named in any level I or level II violations. He was a dead man walking, even if he walked farther than anyone anticipated.
What I ‘m fascinated to learn is this: how blood thirsty the is the NCAA?
How does the NCAA choose to level its punishment? If you’re an Ole Miss fan, you unfortunately do not need me to explain the severity of level I violations and being charged with a lack of institutional control. And while the bulk of the violations are tied to the LSU basketball program, the football program is still charged with multiple level I infractions.
So, how blood thirsty is the NCAA? Although it is rightfully perceived as incompetent, tone deaf, antiquated and losing its grip of an ecosystem it once strictly dictated, the one thing the NCAA is not is totally powerless. While two decades of botched investigations coupled NIL running wild and unregulated over the last nine months might have made the NCAA seem obsolete, it can still flex its muscle when given an easy dunk. Not only did the FBI give the NCAA a slam dunk case, the NCAA is presumably looking to make an example out of someone to remind its member institutions that it is still the governing body of this cash cow. LSU looks like a prime target. If so, how hard does it hit LSU Football? The basketball program will likely be decimated with crippling sanctions, but how harsh the NCAA is in its treatment of the football program is what I am interested in. Ole Miss fans know the irrational wrath of this clown show all too well when NCAA is made to look foolish, will LSU feel the brunt of that wrath too?
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The Field of 68 is set
One of the three weeks in sports is here as the NCAA Tournament field is set. More fans and media than usual seemed upset at the selection committee’s rational when it came to a pair of SEC teams. Texas A&M was denied a spot in the field despite entering last week’s SEC Tournament in Tampa firmly on the bubble and making a run to the championship game. The NCAA opted for Michigan and Rutgers instead, giving the Big 10 nine bids to the SEC’s six. If you watched college basketball this year, can you say with certainty the Big 10 was better than the SEC? I don’t know you can.
Secondly, Tennessee, who beat Texas A&M in the SEC Tournament championship game, was awarded a three seed. Many thought The Vols’ run in Tampa was enough to propel them to a one seed, but at the very least, cemented their status as a two seed.
We can argue metrics and indefensible seedings all day long. Instead, let’s take a simple lesson from it: the NCAA selection committee does not care about conference tournaments. Over the last five years, it has made that abundantly clear, yet there is outrage and surprise each year upon relearning this revelation. I don’t understand why the committee doesn’t care. I’d argue the conference tournament games should count as much or more than the regular season games, given that they are on a neutral floor and played at the end of the year, but this is clearly not the case. It’s a shame, because the conference tournaments are incredibly compelling TV and it is a bummer that the appetizer to March Madness is apparently inconsequential in setting the stage for the main course.
Cam Smith wins rain-soaked Players Championship
Cam Smith won The Players in a rain-soaked Monday finish. He did so thanks to a final-round 6-under 66 that included this ballsy shot on the famous 17th hole.
Smith stood on the 18th tee with two-shot lead over Anirban Lahiri. I guess Smith hadn’t had enough drama because he put his tee shot in the right trees and then shot his punch-out shot through the fairway and into the water. Smith needed this clutch up-and-down for bogey to secure the title.
That bogey made him $3.2 million richer. I don’t have much of a strong take on this, so instead I will show you the ridiculous payout structure for this tournament — the highest purse in golf.
Put a golf club in your kids’ hands.
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