With 2023 in the rearview, Selection Monday 2024 will be a telling day for Ole Miss Baseball
After a disastrous 2023 season, how does Ole Miss prevent this from happening again?
Memorial Day in the world of college baseball is known by a different title: Selection Monday. The day in which the 64-team NCAA Tournament field is announced, one day after the 16 host sites are unveiled on Sunday evening. This year, Selection Monday came and went without Ole Miss being so much as a footnote in the proceedings.
For just the fourth time in the Mike Bianco era, the Rebels missed the NCAA Tournament. Unlike the other three occasions (2002, 2011 and 2017), this one was not remotely close. Ole Miss posted a putrid 25-29 (6-24) record this season.
In 2002, Bianco’s second year, Ole Miss went 32-24 (14-16) and were in the mix for an at-large bid, but ultimately fell on the wrong side of the bubble.
The 2011 campaign was a weird one. Ole Miss entered the final weekend of the regular season with a 12-15 conference record and had a chance to win a crowded SEC West, but lost two of three at Arkansas, finished last in the division at 13-17, and ultimately missed both the SEC Tournament and the NCAA Tournament. But were at least firmly in the mix.
In 2017, a year of growing pains for a young team that featured freshmen Thomas Dillard, Grae Kessinger and Cooper Johnson, the Rebels posted a 32-25 (14-16) record and were firmly on the bubble entering a Tuesday single-elimination contest against Auburn in the SEC Tournament. Ole Miss lost that game, 5-4, and were just barely on the outside looking in on Selection Monday.
So, with those three prior instances in mind, it’s quite obvious that this 2023 season was both disastrous and unprecedented. The 6-24 mark in SEC play tied the program’s worst ever SEC record since the league expanded to 30 conference games (the other occasion was the 1997 season, four years before Bianco took over the program). This season was the first time in the Bianco era that Ole Miss finished with fewer than 30 total wins and is the first time the program has ever posted a sub .500 record under his guidance.
Without belaboring the point, the 2023 season was a catastrophe that fell well below the expectations bestowed upon the defending national champions and came far short of the baseline standards of the well-funded and supported program Bianco has built. It was an output that Ole Miss can ill-afford to repeat in 2024. This date next year (Selection Monday 2024) will be a fascinating and telling checkpoint as it pertains to the long-term future of the Ole Miss Baseball program. Understanding the full scope of what’s ahead for Bianco and his staff as they work to prevent a repetitive result requires examining why the 2023 season happened and how that shapes their path to rectifying it.
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The anatomy of a disaster
How did the 2023 season happen? How did the defending national champions, a team with a No. 4 preseason ranking, take such a violent nosedive? The answer is layered, and is explainable in some ways while baffling in others. The Rebels returned five of eight Opening Day starters from the 2022 team and six of nine if you count Hunter Elliott on the mound. Reagan Burford, also a returnee but not a regular starter in 2022, got the nod at designated hitter. And while that lineup was far from a carbon copy of the one in 2022 that hoisted the sport’s most coveted trophy, it is hardly one indicative of a significant rebuild from the previous season. Given the lack of depth on the pitching staff due to the departures of Dylan DeLucia and Brandon Johnson, and losing Josh Mallitz to an elbow injury in the fall, the preseason ranking felt a little high, but still in the ballpark of what this team could be.
The injuries to the pitching staff is the explainable element of the struggle. Ole Miss’ weakness was always going to be its pitching depth with Mallitz on the shelf, the task of filling two vacant weekend rotation slots and the closer role. The Rebels lost Elliott to an elbow injury after one start, which ultimately cost him his season aside from a brief return against LSU in late April when the season had already slipped away. Removing Elliott from the equation drastically changed the calculus as to what this team’s ceiling could be. The conversation shifted from whether Ole Miss was a surefire host and borderline national seed, to whether it could stay afloat long enough until Elliott’s projected April return to still be in the hosting mix, or at the very least, firmly on track to be a two seed in the NCAA Tournament. The recipe toward achieving this was an offense that was thought to be one of the best in the conference carrying the team through a daunting SEC slate and giving a depleted (and inexperienced) pitching staff an increased margin for error. That didn’t happen, and is the less explainable portion of the slog that was the 2023 season.
Entering the season, Ole Miss had to replace the production of Tim Elko, Kevin Graham and Justin Bench, three lynchpins to a lineup that was as potent as any in the sport when firing on all cylinders. Hardly an easy task, but more palatable given that Jacob Gonzalez, Calvin Harris and Kemp Alderman returned, along with experienced and serviceable bats like T.J. McCants and Peyton Chatagnier. Through the non-conference slate, Ole Miss appeared to have not missed a beat as it ranked in the top 20 nationally in team batting average, slugging percentage, home runs and on-base percentage. Non-conference stats aren’t the most precise indicator of strength, but are usually a decent general gauge. No metric foreshadowed the impending plunge.
In SEC play, the offense finished the year dead last in the conference in slugging percentage, on base percentage, runs scored, runs driven in and and walks. It hit the second fewest home runs, was 12th in batting average and struck out the most of any club. Pitching injuries aside, there was never a world in which this level of collective offensive output would equate to a remotely successful team. Even if the pitching staff was fully healthy for the entirety of the year, it’s doubtful the Rebels would’ve fared substantially better. The depleted pitching staff was actually slightly better than the offense in terms of how it fared statistically against its opposition. Think about how wild of a statement that is after watching this debacle with your own eyes.
In SEC series finales — a setting in which the team with the better offense seemingly has the advantage due to the weakest starters taking the mound and two previous days of bullpen use — Ole Miss average 5.7 runs per game. If you remove the anomaly that was the 20-run outburst in the finale at Missouri, the Rebels averaged 4.1 runs per game in SEC game threes. They went 2-8 in finales. The two wins came against Georgia (eight runs scored) and the 20-run explosion versus Mizzou.
It’s a strange juxtaposition when you consider that Ole Miss had three players named second team All-SEC in a loaded conference: Kemp Alderman, Jacob Gonzalez and Calvin Harris. That trio combined for a .971 on-base-plus-slugging percentage (OPS). The rest of the regulars in the lineup posted a collective .628 OPS. That is an astounding disparity.
Ole Miss hit 36 home runs in league play. That aforementioned trio hit 22 of them. The Rebels drove in 140 runs with that trio accounting for exactly half (70). A portion of the offensive regression can be attributed to the somewhat on-brand inconsistency from Chatagnier and a poor year from T.J. McCants. Some of it was precisely what the program lost in Elko, Bench and Gonzalez — consistency. Those three pieces were the most dependable cogs of an up-and-down 2022 lineup that kept the team afloat during their worst stretches. But some of it can also be attributed to how Ole Miss went about replacing them and who it depended upon to fill the void. And perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from the 2023 season as it pertains to roster construction. More on that in a second.
To conclude the synopsis of how this 2023 campaign happened, the combination of a short-handed pitching staff and a woefully inept offense led to exactly what Ole Miss was: the worst team in the Southeastern Conference. The pitching was mostly explainable due to injuries. Beyond what they already lost one weekend into the season, impending injuries to Mitch Murrell, Jack Dougherty and Matt Parenteau made it impossible to have any real expectations of the pitching staff by the time the calendar turned to May and the season was long lost.
Every SEC program has a year like this. Until this season, Ole Mis was the lone exception, which is a testament Bianco’s remarkable consistency that’s spanned two decades, one forged by the sturdy infrastructure he built within the program. His teams have never sucked, until this one.
At risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll reiterate once more that the 2023 season was an unmitigated disaster that cannot be repeated. It’s a weird declaration to make one year removed from a national title, but given the rapidly evolving landscape of college baseball, it’s a fair and accurate one.
There are lessons to be learned from it, too. This coaching staff is acutely aware of that, but from an on-looker’s perspective, what are those lessons that we should monitor this offseason?
Ole Miss must have a better hit rate in the portal
The one-time free transfer rule went into effect on April 28, 2021. NIL became legal on July 1, 2021. Because of where college baseball’s season falls on the calendar, the transfer portal didn’t really become a significant roster building tool until after the 2022 season. Ole Miss added three transfers last offseason. Tulane Transfer Ethan Groff, Anthony Calarco from Northwestern and Xavier Rivas from Division II Indianapolis University.
Groff and Calarco, along with JUCO transfer Ethan Lege, were the de facto replacements for Bench, Elko and Graham. While that’s nearly an impossible ask to expect them to mirror the production of their predecessors, this group didn’t register in the same stratosphere. Calarco slashed (average/on-base percentage/slugging percentage) .213/.330/.348 in SEC play. Groff was worse at .214/.269/.274, but to his credit, played a pretty good defensive center field. Lege is the most compelling case of competence. He registered a slash line of .245/.325/.382 and did so while absorbing a 2-19 start in the first seven SEC games. After the Texas A&M series, Lege was a decently productive bat despite a team-leading nine errors on the year.
But the bottom line here is that the two portal additions plus Lege from junior college did not come close to producing at the level needed to make Ole Miss a strong offense and their collective deficiency was only magnified by the struggles of McCants and Chatagnier. That cannot happen again. Ole Miss’ 2024 portal crop simply must be astronomically better than the 2023 group was.
Rivas, on the other hand, was mostly as good as advertised. He was brought in to be a back-end weekend rotation guy and went at least five innings in six of his 10 conference starts. He struck out 66 and walked 29 in those 10 starts and allowed 48 hits in 49.2 innings. A 6.70 SEC ERA with a 1.57 WHIP is hardly anything to write home about, but in the guy’s defense, he was never supposed to be a Friday Night guy, despite having to assume that role for the last four series of the season. What an unenviable position Rivas occupied. He got no run support on Sundays, and then was asked to square off against the best pitchers in the sport for the season’s final month. In an offseason that will see significant roster turnover, I would assume he’s one of the few that this staff wants back for next year if he doesn’t elect to sign with an MLB club.
While Rivas doesn’t count as a transfer portal miss, the lack of competence around him that forced him into such a tough role is the lesson to be learned as it pertains to the pitching staff. Ole Miss had to replace DeLucia, and I guess technically Derek Diamond (really, the Rebels just needed to find a third starter in general), but ultimately did not have an above average weekend starting pitcher on the roster outside of Elliott. I am excluding Dougherty from this discussion because while he was more than serviceable in assuming a role he was never designed to play, the sheer reality that he was the team’s obvious and only plan-B option as a Friday night starter when Elliott went down is an indictment on the pitching depth and underscores my point more poignantly than any anecdote I can offer you.
As previously mentioned, Ole Miss was always going to be thin on pitching entering this season. Relying on a true freshman in Grayson Saunier as a weekend starter in any capacity was always going to be a dicey proposition. That’s not a Saunier-specific criticism nor is it a slight toward his long-term future. In the fall, Bianco called him arguably the most talented freshman he’d ever seen, and I have little reason to doubt that, but the SEC is an insanely difficult step up in competition from high school, no matter how talented a player is. Gunnar Hoglund was a first round pick out of high school and struggled mightily as a freshman. The Mallitz injury aside, Ole Miss entered this 2023 season with a true freshman and a D-II transfer as its latter two weekend starters, with seemingly no viable plan-B should one of them struggle. When Elliott got injured after his first start, Ole Miss had two healthy pitchers on its roster that had thrown at least four career SEC innings. How does that happen?
There is also a conversation to be had about the diversity amongst the pitching staff. Ole Miss typically has a boatload of right-handed arms who throw in the low-to-mid 90s with a sharp breaking ball, and if they have a third pitch, it is usually a change-up. There are a multitude of reasons for this. Ole Miss is not a program with scholarship advantages. Historically, this limits the type of pitchers they are realistically able to target. Bianco has seemingly developed a formula, and a damn successful one, in terms of the profile of pitcher that he recruits. And please don’t confuse this as me armchair-quarterbacking the recruiting efforts of one of the greatest coaches in the history of college baseball. It’s hardly that, but with the available avenues of recruiting seemingly expanded in this transfer portal and NIL era, it’s worth wondering if Ole Miss now has the ability and the means to diversify the profile of its pitching staff. But a more detailed exposé on this topic is a conversation for another day. The point is this that whether it be recruiting misses, a bottom point of the talent cycle, or an oversight in roster construction, Ole Miss was exposed for its lack of pitching depth in a year that it needed it most, and that cannot be the case in 2024.
The overarching point is this: Ole Miss is going to have to be more active and more successful in the transfer portal than most other schools in the SEC and across the country if it wishes to rectify what happened in 2023.
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College Baseball recruiting in 2023 is a brand new world
What makes all of this so fascinating is that it is an entirely new frontier for Bianco and his staff. The transfer portal and NIL are new phenomenons for college sports as a whole, but as we talked about at the top of this segment, it’s particularly new for college baseball. And it is likely even more new for Bianco and this coaching staff.
One of the many screwed up elements of this lawless ecosystem that college sports currently resides in is the fact that the unsuccessful programs are given a leg up in transfer portal recruiting. The latest portal recruiting window opened up on Memorial Day, May 29. It presumably opened up on around the same date a year ago. If a program missed the NCAA Tournament, or were eliminated in the regional round a week later, its sole focus turned to roster reconstruction, which obviously includes the portal. If you’re a program like Ole Miss in 2022, who was playing baseball until the last weekend of June, one can easily understand how difficult it is expend energy on portal recruiting while simultaneously being in pursuit of a national title. College Baseball is not like football. There aren’t a litany of recruiting-specific staffers to handle a year-round job. Hell, college baseball can’t even pay a third assistant coach. Anyway, because of all the reasons outlined above, the Rebels don’t have the problem they had a year ago. Their sole focus now, and has been for a over a week, is on building a winning roster for 2024.
So, in that sense, all excuses are now null and void. Simply put, Ole Miss must be active and dominant in the transfer portal if it wishes to amend for the mess it made in 2023. My friend and colleague Chase Parham wrote a column a couple of weeks ago that you should read. In it, he reported that he believes Ole Miss is armed with a competitive NIL war chest to attract talent. That’s significant in this modern age of college baseball.
LSU currently has one of the most talented college baseball teams ever assembled. That assembly was not cheap. While I find it irresponsible to speculate on dollar amounts without having concrete information, I am of the educated belief that LSU’s current roster totals nearly seven figures in NIL money. A sane person might point out that a seven-figure NIL “payroll” for a college baseball team is patently absurd, particularly so when you consider that the Oakland Athletics, an actual Major League Baseball team, is paying its entire active roster $43 million, but welcome to the wild world of NIL. If you find any of this hard to believe, I’d remind you that LSU’s football program stole money from a children’s hospital to pay football recruits less than five year ago
(But hey, they’re just a bunch of fun-loving Cajuns who should never be questioned)
It is of course unrealistic to expect or assume Ole Miss Baseball’s NIL budget is remotely in the same tax bracket as LSU. No one is, but based off of Chase’s reporting and what I have heard myself, the Rebels are more than competitive in this space, so what do they do with it?
Another fascinating subplot in all of this is just how drastic of a change in landscape this is for Bianco and his staff. If you’re reading this as a devout fan, or even casual fan of college sports, you likely understand what a slimy industry recruiting is in major college sports. But college baseball recruiting has long been the antithesis of that, and has weirdly been an ecosystem unaffected by modern times. When I covered the program as a full-time reporter, I quickly learned that college baseball operated under a gentlemen’s agreement adhered to at an almost mafia-like, La-Cosa-Nostra level — that when a player commits to a school, all other suiters end their pursuit of that player. Trust me, it was abided by. I was as amazed at seeing it as you are reading it. Hell, that agreement may still be in place. I haven’t the slightest clue, but this newly-minted NIL, one-time-free transfer system flies in the face of that semblance of decency. It’s an environment with few rules that actively awards those who break those few rules the most blatantly. Tampering is a requirement.
Will this staff be able to adjust to this morally bankrupt new normal? Bianco is a smart man. He’s also a principled one. I’ve covered many coaches in college athletics through the years, and despite the differences we’ve had that I love to joke about, Mike Bianco is one of he best human beings working in college sports. And I’m hardly one to care about the morality of the subjects I cover. I’m simply telling the truth. He’s also someone who is set in his ways and believes in what he does. And while he does not get nearly enough credit for adapting to modern baseball philosophies — and yes, I know he just started shifting the year after MLB outlawed it, but I’m referring to how he’s utilized pitching analytics to better his players’ breaking balls and fastball spin rate, among other things — he has a reputation for being set in his ways.
Generally speaking, Bianco also (rightfully) believes that the way he’s always done things, the way that built this program from the ground up, is the way to forge onward. As it pertains to recruiting, that is simply no longer true, and I believe that Bianco, as crazy as it seems, one year removed from a national title, is at a philosophical crossroads — one that will ultimately define his final chapters at Ole Miss.
It’s a strange place to be, right? I never figured I’d be writing this column with Ole Miss 10 months removed from a national title, but I feel that it’s warranted. The Rebels reaching the pinnacle of the sport coincided with a seismic change as to how a winning team is assembled.
“Adapt or die,” Brad Pitt said in the movie Moneyball while depicting Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane. From a 10,000-foot view, I believe that encapsulates where Ole Miss is as a baseball program.
The 2023 season cannot happen again. Memorial Day 2024, better known as Selection Monday 2024, will be a telling day as it pertains to the direction of this program. The message that’s sent on that day, 363 days from now, will largely be shaped by the measures taken by Bianco and his staff in the handful of months between now and the time Ole Miss plays its next competitive baseball game in February of 2024.
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