Ole Miss to Omaha: Tim Elko said, “Don’t let the Rebels get hot.” They did. Boy, did they.
Finally, at long last, Ole Miss, in the year of our Lord, 2022, is returning to Omaha and the College World Series.
The Rebels punched their ticket by sweeping two games at host Southern Miss in the Hattiesburg Super Regional over the weekend, including a 5-0 win on Sunday. They’re a perfect 5-0 in the NCAA Tournament.
My friend, your eyes do not deceive you. Take a moment. You’ve earned it. There was little or no drama outside of a few innings here and there. We’re talking boilerplate baseball stuff.
OK, not quite.
There was nothing normal about Southern Miss loading the bases against Dylan DeLucia on Saturday. Ole Miss led 3-0, and a would-be go-ahead grand slam for the Golden Eagles literally missed the foul (or — more appropriately — fair) pole by inches.
Or on Sunday, in the eighth, when USM loaded the bases again against starter Hunter Elliott and Josh Mallitz. But Mallitz got the Rebels out of the jam with a pop-up to Southern Miss’ most powerful hitter, Carson Paetow. He had 16 homers.
The Rebels did the reverse Ole Miss to secure the program’s first-ever Super Regional sweep.
No fooling. They did.
There wasn’t another game-three nightmare — Ole Miss losing game one, recovering in game two and restoring hope, only to suffer a soul-crushing loss in a finale.
They just … won. As if they were supposed to win; supposed to run roughshod over a Top 15 team with a pitching staff on par with even the best the SEC has to offer.
We’ve all been (mercifully) spared another offseason of the same played-out, stale arguments that typically come with the dog days of summer in Oxford. The haters — and their snarky O.M.A.H.A. (Ole Miss at home again) abbreviation — are in shambles.
Ole Miss will leave out in a few days for what will be just the second trip to Omaha under Mike Bianco in his two-plus decades as head coach. Ole Miss has been twice since the 70s.
Coincidentally, the Rebels last got there in 2014, the only other year when the program, under Bianco, faced similar uncertainty and unrest.
Sources indicate Ole Miss and Bianco were widely expected to part ways had the Rebels missed out on the postseason entirely — which, if we’re being honest, had an air of inevitability after a first-round loss to Vanderbilt in the SEC Tournament.
The Bianco debate is over for a long, long while. Maybe forever.
Who knows in this day and age in college sports, but it would take years and lots of WAOM moments (Tennessee Tech left SCARS) for it to pick back up again.
Bianco now probably hangs up his Ole Miss No. 5 jersey when he’s good and ready, and that was always the best-case scenario. Why? Because that means Ole Miss won.
Ole Miss winning is kind of the point of this grand experiment.
Athletics director Keith Carter cited Omaha appearances (or a lack of them) as the root cause for his decision against rolling Bianco over a couple of years ago. Carter, a former Ole Miss basketball standout, even stood by Bianco as the latter very publicly flirted with LSU, his alma mater, in July.
Ole Miss and Bianco ultimately stayed together for the kids, I guess?
It could have been awkward. It could have been messy. Bianco faced legitimate questions.
To his credit, it wasn’t.
As the best program-promoters do, Bianco, when all seemed lost, pulled out his dictionary-thick college baseball rolodex and went to work to help sway the power brokers in and around the sport to put his team in the NCAA Tournament.
A bit of a Hail Mary, but, hey, Doug Flutie is a famous quarterback for a reason.
Ole Miss was the last team named to the field and given a rather surprising break the Rebels, until recently, hadn’t particularly earned with their on-field play. They were seven games under .500 in the SEC on May 1.
Any fair-minded person can acknowledge what Bianco has done as lead program-builder since he was hired away from McNeese State to resurrect Ole Miss in 2001. The Rebels are an every-year contender — sturdy in structure and bones. They recruit at a high level (two No. 1 classes), and they’ve made the postseason in all but three of Bianco’s 21 seasons.
Increased expectations follow, though, and that’s where Bianco had fallen short.
Regional and Super Regional hosts are assumed, but Ole Miss had made an ugly habit of face-planting with everything on the line. The Rebels dealt with some bad luck, to be sure, and the overall math still isn’t pretty (2-9 in Omaha advancement opportunities), but they’ve reached the sport’s Promised Land.
At the end of the rainbow is some well-earned hardware. Go win the thing.
Legitimate shots to win a championship have, historically, been few and far between at Ole Miss.
The loudest of Bianco critics simply wanted the one sport (baseball) where the Rebels are almost always right there to put everything together a time (or two) en route to an I-can-die-happy moment.
Done and done. Ole Miss didn’t trip at the finish line. Slip on a banana peel into a ball pit of jelly beans and silly string. Step on the rake.
You get the picture.
Instead, Ole Miss, this time around, left no doubt.
First, the Rebels ran through the Miami (Fla.) Regional field — capped by a 22-6 shellacking of Arizona. The same Wildcats that handed the Rebels their most recent unceremonious postseason exit just a year earlier.
Second, the Rebels finished the fight and ended up exactly where they were expected to be coming into the season.
Omaha bound.
How the Rebels got here is immaterial. They’re here, they’ve made it, and they’ve exorcised so many demons in the process.
Tim Elko deserve this. Kevin Graham deserves this. Justin Bench deserves this. Bianco deserves this, too, possibly more than anyone. But let’s start with the three veterans.
They’re accomplished sluggers and some of the best at their respective positions in school history. They weren’t supposed to be at Ole Miss this season, either.
The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, and sports were’t immune.
The 2021 MLB Draft was cut in half (to 20 rounds). In any other year, Elko, Graham and Bench would have assuredly had their names called, albeit as mid-to-late-round selections.
They were left out in the cold. Ole Miss obviously benefited, but the cost was three next-level hopefuls delaying careers in a profession where the deck is already stacked against them.
Even so, Ole Miss rolled it back with eight of its nine lineup regulars — notable, seeing as the Rebels were fresh off a campaign in which their offense was, statistically, one of the most dangerous groups in the country.
They’d finished Top 5 nationally in pretty much every slugging category of consequence, home runs among them.
Baseball is weird game, though.
A hitter failing in 70 percent of his at-bats is considered good. Nothing is guaranteed or given. The Regression Monster comes without warning, and it has no remorse.
Ole Miss was up and down despite the returning firepower, and the Rebels fell well short of expectations after a brief, early-season stint as college baseball’s No. 1.
Graham, who is tied for fourth on the team in homers, was out for over a month with an injury. He’s a middle-of-the-order, left-handed stalwart who’s started all 41 of the games in which he’s appeared, but Ole Miss was without him for 18.
Elko got off to a slow start, but the three-time team captain eventually came around and set the single-season Ole Miss home-run record. He hit three homers in the regional-clinching laugher against Arizona.
Build the statue already.
Bench has been as steady, and versatile, as always. He hasn’t repeated the increased power production (seven home runs) of last season, but he’s played all over the field and gotten on base at a nice clip (OBP over .400) atop the batting order.
His third hit on Sunday plated Ole Miss’ fourth run.
Peyton Chatagnier struggled mightily in the regular season, only to come alive once the calendar flipped to do-or-die postseason games. Ole Miss settled on DeLucia and Elliott as its Top 2 starters. They’re not Doug Nikhazy and Gunnar Hoglund.
They never had to be … in theory. So long as the offense was clicking on all cylinders. It is now, and Elliott did his best Nikhazy impression in an unforgettable, legendary start in the decider. He allowed no runs on three hits in setting new career-highs in innings (7.1) and strikeouts (10).
Elliott was pulled with two on and one out in the eighth. A resurgent Mallitz came out with nothing but sliders and closed it out.
Elliott has struck out eight or more in five of his last six games. He’s pitched 12.1 combined postseason innings with one run on seven hits and 18 strikeouts.
Elliott wears No. 26, just like Nikhazy.
He’s left-handed, just like Nikhazy. He’s got long, surfer hair, just like Nikhazy.
We could be watching, in real time, the emergence of the next Ole Miss great. He retired 16 Golden Eagles in a row before a lead-off single in the eighth.
DeLucia and Elliott are valuable enough as rotation stabilizers, but they’ve taken their games to another level during the title chase. DeLucia took the mound first for Ole Miss’ first shutout of the year in the Super Regional opener.
Elliott did DeLucia one better.
They never back down. DeLucia (5.2 innings, four hits, no runs, nine strikeouts, two walks) stared defiantly at home plate after he recorded one of his nine strikeouts to get out of the bases-loaded jam.
Ole Miss fans, in turn, collectively fist-pumped.
But back to Bianco.
Two things can be true: Ole Miss underachieved, bordering on tanking, in the regular season AND the Rebels have caught fire and they’re playing like one of the nation’s best teams. They were always capable.
Bianco, fairly or not, shoulders credit and blame in equal order. He’s also no longer the story, which has to be a relief for, well, everybody.
And I mean EVERYBODY.
The Ole Miss baseball Rebels are in the College World Series. What a sentence.
To borrow from Elko, writing on Twitter following the selection show two weeks ago: “Don’t let the Rebels get hot.”
Somebody print the t-shirts. Bianco has first dibs.
