This is an opinion piece.
Repeat after me. Auburn can’t lose to Coastal Carolina. Auburn cannot lose to Coastal Carolina. Auburn CAN NOT lose to Coastal Carolina.
No pressure, Butch Thompson, but the reputation of the entire Southeastern Conference is riding on you, Ike Irish and the rest of the sweet-swinging Tigers. Imagine the barbs if you, as the No. 4 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament – the second-highest remaining seed behind No. 3 Arkansas – lose the first home Super Regional in program history to a team called the Chants.
Talk about a Big Hurt. The anti-SEC brigade would break the Internet, then stage a parade from here to Omaha.
You do understand the assignment, don’t you? This will not do.
You would think SEC baseball’s stature would be worthy of its own statue by now outside Charles Schwab Field, the home of the College World Series. The league has won five straight, six of the last seven and 10 of the last 15 national championships. Those titles were spread among seven SEC programs. The league filled 19 of the 30 spots in the CWS championship series from 2009-24, 11 of 14 since 2017.
No major college sport has witnessed extended excellence like this since SEC football won seven straight, eight of 10 and 13 of 17 big rings from 2006-22 with a team from the league finishing runner-up six times in that stretch. Football didn’t spread the wealth quite as much as baseball with five programs winning it all.
You know what SEC haters say about all that? Ancient history. What have you done lately? And by lately, as far as SEC baseball is concerned, they mean last week.
On Memorial Day, the SEC set a record by sending 13 teams into the NCAA Tournament field. Over the next seven days, the league set another record with nine teams eliminated in the regionals. No. 1 seed Vanderbilt, No. 2 Texas, No. 7 Georgia and No. 10 Ole Miss got bounced on their home fields. To deepen the misery, five of the SEC teams that came up short were sent home by mid-majors: Alabama by Southern Miss, Florida by East Carolina, Ole Miss by Murray State, Texas by UTSA and Vandy by Wright State.
At least Alabama was dismissed by a regional host. Small consolation for a Crimson Tide team that got to Hoover for the SEC Tournament with hopes of hosting its own regional. AD Greg Byrne focused on the bigger picture and rewarded coach Rob Vaughn, after two years of regular-season progress, with a contract extension.
All Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan got for his regional trip to Conway, S.C., was a starring role in some R-rated (for language) viral videos and the need for dueling apologies from him and AD Scott Stricklin. Nothing like a national championship coach’s profane reaction to a game-time change.
If you were coming off back-to-back College World Series trips, you’d be chapped, too, if you were sent to the regional loser’s bracket by an East Carolina team that finished sixth in the AAC. The Pirates finished the job after O’Sullivan’s tirade by eliminating the all-bark, no-bite Gators.
The last thing the SEC needs this weekend is another collective collapse in the Supers. Tennessee and Arkansas can’t embarrass the league – at least on the scoreboard – because they play each other in Fayetteville. If LSU fails to protect the Box in Baton Rouge, it’ll be an upset, but at least its opponent, West Virginia, lives in a power conference.
Auburn is the only one of the SEC’s four remaining teams meeting a mid-major, although that descriptive does not do Coastal Carolina justice. The Chanticleers won the College World Series in 2016, which puts them one-up on Auburn in baseball national championships.
The current collection of Chants is 51-11. They went 26-4 in the competitive Sun Belt to win the regular-season title and swept the conference tournament at Riverwalk Stadium in Montgomery. They’ve won 21 straight games and haven’t lost since April 22. They swept through their home regional last weekend without having to face Florida. They also went 2-0 against Clemson this season in mid-week games.
Their resume is on-point, but that’s not the point. This is the point. If Auburn loses, the SEC can have no more than two teams advance to the College World Series, which would be the smallest number since only Florida made it there in 2016. If the No. 4 national seed from the SEC loses a Super Regional at home to even a damn strong Sun Belt mid-major, the league outsiders love to hate will never hear the end of it.
So while Auburn can lose to Coastal Carolina, Auburn can’t lose to Coastal Carolina. Especially now that the Tigers have graduated from ESPN+ to ESPN 2 for Games 1 and 2. It’s their turn to go national, go postal on Coastal and put a Big Hurt on all those big-mouth SEC bashers.
The home of Frank Thomas, Bo Jackson and Tim Hudson should expect nothing less.
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