STARKVILLE — Chris Lemonis spent more than a week telling anyone who would listen why his Mississippi State team deserved to host an NCAA regional, and he had plenty of talking points in his favor.
The Bulldogs had 16 Quadrant 1 wins, more than anyone else except Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas A&M — who ended up being the top three national seeds in the NCAA Tournament. They finished fifth in the toughest conference in college baseball at 17-13, and really had 20 Southeastern Conference wins, factoring in the Governor’s Cup victory over Ole Miss and two wins in the SEC Tournament last week in Hoover, Alabama.
But it was not to be for MSU thanks to a weak non-conference schedule, some bad early losses and a resulting RPI of 25. The Bulldogs instead will be the 2-seed in the Charlottesville Regional, hosted by No. 12 Virginia, with a first-round game Friday evening against St. John’s.
“It’s just so subjective in (the committee) room,” Lemonis said. “They take the pieces they want and move them around, and obviously our RPI wasn’t as good as it should have been. We lost a couple early in the year, the first week of the season probably is what you can look at. I heard the (chair) of the committee talk about consistency and common opponents, and a lot of the things he talked about didn’t have anything to do with us.”
RPI, which places a heavy emphasis on strength of schedule, is far from perfect in determining the best teams, and the selection committee does not always follow it strictly. Indiana State, at No. 10 in the RPI, lost the championship game in the Missouri Valley Tournament and was not selected as a host, while Arizona, at No. 31, won the Pac-12 regular season and tournament titles and earned the No. 13 national seed.
The final hosting spot came down to MSU, Duke and East Carolina, with the Pirates — despite the nation’s No. 71-ranked strength of schedule — getting the nod at No. 16. East Carolina athletic director Jon Gilbert was on the committee this year.
“That was a collection of teams that we spent a great deal of time on,” committee chair Matt Hogue, the athletic director at Coastal Carolina, said on the ESPN broadcast. “We looked at common opponents, the amount of series wins, consistency of play throughout the year. … At the end of the day, the committee felt that East Carolina deserved that spot.”
The Bulldogs did play the No. 132-ranked non-conference schedule and stumbled out of the gates, dropping single games to Air Force and Georgia Southern and losing twice to Austin Peay in February, and they also fell to Central Arkansas in a midweek game in early April. But they also won a series against Georgia, a top-8 national seed, took two of three from Vanderbilt on the road and defeated Texas A&M, at the time the top team in the RPI, in Hoover.
MSU and East Carolina had just one common opponent — the Bulldogs defeated Memphis twice, once at each team’s home, while the Pirates swept a three-game road series against the Tigers. The SEC received 11 bids to the tournament, the most any conference has ever earned.
“You don’t know who’s in the room, who’s fighting for you and everything else and what’s the fight for,” Lemonis said. “That’s the only knock you’ve got on us is RPI, and it’s not the best thing. It’s the best if your team is in that situation, but unfortunately it is what it is.”
Still, MSU is playing postseason baseball for the first time since winning the 2021 national championship. Center fielder Connor Hujsak and relief pitcher Tyler Davis actually played in a regional in Starkville in 2021 with Virginia Commonwealth, but they are the only two players on the active roster with NCAA Tournament experience. Pitcher Stone Simmons was on the 2021 championship team but is out for the season with an injury.
The Bulldogs’ last postseason trip to Charlottesville was a memorable one — MSU swept Virginia in two games in the 2013 super regionals to advance to the Men’s College World Series, where the Bulldogs reached the finals before falling to UCLA.
“We’re not going to go to an atmosphere that’s too big for us. We’ve done that already,” Lemonis said. “We’re not going to go somewhere where there’s a team that’s just better than what we’ve played. No offense to Virginia or anybody, but we’ve just played the best in the country, and I doubt many people want us showing up at their regional.”
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