Jay Johnson identifies multiple moments that showed him how special this LSU team was on title run

The LSU baseball team turned into a juggernaut in 2025, but that’s not to say it was always destined to win a championship. Those are earned, often painstakingly.

Still, there were signs for coach Jay Johnson early on that he had a team that could win it all. It all had to do with how his guys bounced back from early adversity.

“I think there was a few things that stuck out to me,” Johnson said on the Mik’d Up With Mikie Mahtook podcast. “No. 1 after we lost our first game to Omaha — and we played pretty dominant through like the first five games — and then we lost a game maybe we shouldn’t have, weird day with the wind blowing in and that sort of deal, and we actually had to play a double-header right after that.

“And I kind of challenged them like, ‘Hey, a lot of times you know what you have right after you lose your first game of the season and how you respond to that.’ Well we went out and won 12-1, played great. Then after that we won 17 games in a row.”

Take one look at LSU’s season schedule and you can see the streakiness. A loss here and there, sprinkled in amongst some huge winning streaks.

“That streak I think got broke at Texas and we lost two in a row, they beat us in the series,” Johnnson recalled. “Which was a very beneficial series for us. I learned a lot about what we needed to do from there, from that series. And then we won like nine in a row right after that. Mississippi State, playing late at night, all those types of things.

“Then you look up and we’ve won 26 of 28 against a pretty good schedule, like, man, there’s something to this. Then we got swept in three tough games at Auburn. They didn’t blow us out, but they beat us. Then we responded well to that.”

Eventually, LSU piled up enough wins that it put itself in a favorable position to do some serious damage in the postseason. The team earned a No. 6 seed nationally, giving it the right to host through the Super Regionals if it kept winning.

That proved tricky. Arkansas-Little Rock pushed LSU to a winner-take-all game in the Baton Rouge Regional.

You can probably guess at this point how the Tigers responded. With aplomb, naturally.

“Every time they got challenged, like we got off the mat quickly and didn’t really spiral or those types of things,” Johnson said. “So it was like that consistency is kind of the hallmark that I’m really proud of. Because you just, you’re going to get bloodied in this thing. It’s baseball No. 1, it’s the SEC No. 2. Nobody’s getting through it perfectly, but I thought they did about as good a job as you could to responding to adversity. And there was no complacency ever.

“I felt like they had this quality of like, and I say this to them, but it’s really hard to get to this, it’s like we’re not validated by our record or what anybody says about us, but like can we do this college baseball program thing as good as it possibly could be done? In every facet of it. I thought they were really bought into that and I think it showed in their ability to be consistent.”