Ole Miss opts against contract rollover for head baseball coach Mike Bianco
Eight of the 16 national seeds in the 2023 NCAA Tournament are from the SEC. The once-defending national champion Ole Miss Rebels isn’t one of them.
Actually, they’re not in the postseason at all after a disastrous season which saw them finish last in the SEC. They suffered their first losing season since 1997. They were the last team named to last year’s tournament and now-famously won 10 of 11 postseason games en route to the program’s first-ever championship.
But outside of that glorious month-plus run, the on-field results over the last two regular seasons have bordered on disastrous. Ole Miss this season finished 25-29 overall. The Rebels were an abysmal 6-24 in SEC games.
They dropped their last six games for the first losing season of the Mike Bianco era. No Rebel team before them had finished with less than 13 conference wins since Bianco’s first season as head coach in 2001.
“It’s easy to look back and look at some injuries,” Bianco said. “Surely that was cause for a lot, but there’s other things — things we’re going to have look back on and fix and we will fix. We’ll hit the ground recruiting and fix this.”
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As reported Monday, athletics director Keith Carter didn’t roll over Bianco’s contract.
Each off-season Carter and Bianco sit down for an end-of-year assessment of the program, as detailed by Carter in a recent one-on-one interview with the Ole Miss Spirit. Chase Parham of RebelGrove/Rivals first-reported the non-rollover.
Bianco was extended out to the state-allowed four-year maximum last summer. However, additional years of commitment can be added through the Ole Miss Loyalty Foundation. So, while Bianco’s contract wasn’t rolled over, sources indicate his contract is for no less than four years.
“Obviously we love what happened last year and the run we made to win the national championship,” Carter said last week. “Certainly really happy for (Bianco) and the team and all that.
“But obviously this year wasn’t up to our standards. Thanks to coach B, we’ve built a program here where not only getting in the NCAA Tournament but making deep runs in the NCAA Tournament is what we do and what we expect. Obviously had injuries that led to some of the downfall this year. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to be a team that’s consistently in the tournament, and we have been. This year, we just didn’t do that.
“We’ve got to get into the portal and find some guys to plug some holes. We’re losing a lot of position guys this year. We’ll have to see how all that shakes out. But we’ll definitely look at that and certainly want to make sure this isn’t the trend to have a year like we had this year.”
