It has been another wild college baseball season in the SEC. The league currently has four of the top five, eight of the top 20 and 10 of the top 24 teams in the RPI.
For an idea of how deep the league is, all four of the top seeds in the SEC Tournament lost their first game of the tourney on Wednesday.
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After No. 2 seed Kentucky was blasted 11-0 by No. 11 seed LSU, Wildcats coach Nick Mingione discussed what makes the conference so difficult.
The Tigers team that beat Kentucky got off to a 3-12 start in SEC play before finishing the season strong.
“It’s really hard to repeat. Look at what’s happened to the two previous national champions. They didn’t even make our conference tournament the last two years. It’s just a real challenge,” Mingione said.
“I was talking to another one of our coaches in the league. I thought he said it great – this league is like the greatest, most intense tug of war.”
Mingione then grabbed the microphone he was speaking into, as well as the cord, to demonstrate his point with a game of tug of war.
“There’s just heavyweights. Guys like flexing their muscles. You’re holding on and it’s like, ‘Man, here we go.’ You gain an inch and it’s like ‘Yea, this is awesome.’ You’re fighting and you’re going and then all of a sudden you get another inch. Then they pull it back two inches and you’re right back to where you were,” Nick Mingione said.
“Then all of a sudden a couple of things don’t go your way and you find yourself on the other end going the wrong way. But it’s so easy. The margin of victory is so small. It is so tiny. It’s why we don’t get days off.”
The SEC has won the past four national championships with four different schools winning them. LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt have won the last four national titles, while Florida also won one recently — doing so in 2017.
The SEC has plenty of contenders for 2024 as well. Texas A&M, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee are in the top 5 of the RPI as the season winds down, while Georgia is in the top 10.
South Carolina, Mississippi State, Alabama, Vanderbilt and LSU should all also be in the postseason and could be difficult outs. As Nick Mingione pointed out, the league is talented and deep and winning games in the SEC is extremely difficult.
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