(Photo from Southern Miss Athletics)
- Southern Miss extended its win streak to 12 games in its weekend SunBelt Conference sweep of Louisiana-Lafayette.
While Mississippi State and Ole Miss continue their restoration projects, baseball season has been rinse and repeat for Southern Miss.
The Golden Eagles, under second-year coach Christian Ostrander, are near the top of their conference again and are expected to qualify for what would be a ninth-consecutive NCAA Tournament.
Southern Miss extended its win streak to 12 games in its weekend SunBelt Conference sweep of Louisiana-Lafayette.
Two games back in the league standings, the Golden Eagles would need big help from Old Dominion to catch No. 14 Coastal Carolina.
The Eagles, three games up on Troy, need one win at Troy in the final regular season series – starting Thursday — to clinch the No. 2 spot.
Both Southern Miss and Troy are in the NCAA field according to the latest regional projections by D1Baseball.com, but the Sun Belt Conference’s weak RPI standing among the conferences – No. 7 — will provide no favors for either team.
The SunBelt sent four teams to NCAA regionals from 2022-2024, a feat achieved only six times since 2000. This doesn’t look like one of those seasons.
Coastal, Southern Miss and Troy get little strength-of-schedule benefit from weekend to weekend in league play.
They also get fewer Quadrant 1 games, a more important metric than RPI.
Southern Miss and Coastal Carolina didn’t play this season, missing the chance for three resume games within the conference schedule.
So Southern Miss presents to the committee four Quad 1 wins and a strength-of-schedule rating of 83.
Coastal offers a No. 60 schedule ranking and four Quad 1 wins, Troy a No. 86 schedule and three Quad 1 wins.
The resumes are enough to get in the field, but for Southern Miss and Troy the benefits stop there.
Coastal is a projected host, an 11 seed, but there will be only one SunBelt host.
The reality is most of the hay is in the barn, and the resumes won’t be greatly impacted one way or the other when teams of similar numeric strength meet at Troy.
You’d like to enter the conference tournament with momentum, but neither Southern Miss nor Troy will affect their status for Montgomery, Alabama much at all. Both will easily bypass the single-elimination round, and the Eagles will be in search of a third-straight conference tournament championship.
Postseason impact of an average-rated conference
Where the SunBelt strength likely further hurts Southern Miss and Troy is postseason destination. All road 2 seeds are not created equal, and neither will be sent to that vulnerable 1 seed that was a questionable host.
D1Baseball projects them to familiar sites, Troy to Tallahassee where Florida State is a projected No. 3 national seed, Southern Miss to Auburn where the Tigers are the projected No. 6.
For Southern Miss, a home loss to Old Dominion on the opening weekend of conference play and a series loss at Marshall, ninth in the league and sub.-500 overall, are stinging right now.
Ostrander, one of the nation’s top pitching coaches when elevated to his first head-coaching position, continues to put together solid staffs. Southern Miss is second in the SunBelt with a 4.13 ERA. Coastal, not surprisingly, leads with a 3.44 ERA and leads with an opponents’ batting average of .225.
Eagles ace JB Middleton, in his likely final home appearance pending the summer MLB draft, struck out the side in the eighth Friday night then stood and soaked in a standing ovation with appreciative fans calling his name, recognizing an elite player for an elite career.
The Eagles won 11-3, and Middleton improved to 9-1, with a 2.00 ERA.
Arms like that – with emphasis on the plural — will be necessary annually if Ostrander is to continue to grow in his new role. Good pitching wins in the postseason. Even the best hitting teams will lose their thunder for stretches against high-level arms.
Last year was a good start, reaching the championship round of the Knoxville Regional before falling to eventual national champion Tennessee.
Scott Berry also reached the NCAA tournament in his first season as Golden Eagles coach, his first two to be exact.
But it would be another five years before he would begin his run of seven straight appearances, a streak that included home super regionals in 2022 and 2023.
Every game means more
Sometimes those special postseasons include winning road regionals – as Ole Miss did in 2022 and as Southern Miss did in 2023 – but deep runs often start from a home-field advantage, and playing at home in June is decided in March, April and a little bit of May.
Paraphrasing a sister conference, in the SunBelt, with fewer resume-building opportunities, every game means more.
Berry and Corky Palmer before him elevated expectations in Hattiesburg.
If Ostrander is to continue their success it will be because he continues to develop arms like Middleton against whom opponents are hitting just .164.
If he surpasses their success and increases Southern Miss’ national profile amid the challenges of a mid-major schedule, it will be because he’s developed similar arm talent on the same staff.
In a league with little margin for error, pitching covers most other sins.
Parrish Alford
