The Champ is (No Longer) Here: Ole Miss, off to worst SEC start in 27 years, drops out of Top 25 polls
Ole Miss baseball is off to its worst SEC start (0-6) in 27 years.
And because of it, the defending-champion Rebels on Monday found themselves outside of most every Top 25 poll for the first time this season.
The Rebels were No. 3 in the country two weeks ago. However, the have now lost seven of their last eight games. They were swept at Vanderbilt to open the conference slate, and the No. 3-ranked Florida Gators rolled into town over the weekend and brought their brooms, too.
Ole Miss (15-9, 0-6 SEC) was ranked No. 13 last week. The Rebels’ only saving grace was they were ranked No. 25 by the league’s coaches. D1Baseball and the Associated Press, to name a few, dropped them altogether.
“You’ve got to stay together and you’ve got to continue to fight,” Ole Miss head coach Mike Bianco said, following Ole Miss’ 7-4 loss on Sunday. “It stinks when you get to this point where you just kind of fall into that funk and you’re not playing.
“It happens like this, where it happens in a lot of phases.”
To be fair, Ole Miss was seven games below .500 last May.
Then came its historic NCAA Tournament run for the program’s first-ever title.
The Rebels won 10 of their 11 postseason games as the final team named to the 64-team field. Their only loss came in Omaha (site of the College World Series), and even then they rebounded in sweeping Oklahoma in the championship series.
Still, little is going right as the Rebels turn to their annual midweek trip to Pearl to again face off with in-state rival Southern Miss. Ole Miss is still powerful offensively, but the Rebels have struggled with cold stretches, exacerbated by a pitching staff without ace left-hander Hunter Elliott and featuring three starters with a collective ERA of 6.27.
“The big thing is filling the strike zone up,” first-year junior college transfer Xavier Rivas, who starts on Sundays, said. He has a rotation-best 4.97 ERA. Ole Miss pitching is giving up over a run an inning in SEC games.
First pitch against Southern Miss is set for 6 p.m. CT on ESPN+. Ole Miss travels to Texas A&M this weekend.
“They’re trying,” Bianco said. “They’re showing up and they’re competing but we still got to continue to go. You got to keep fighting.”
