Is this or is this not late May?
At the beginning of the month, I wrote about how LSU needs to find seven wins before Memorial Day to lock up an NCAA Tournament berth. Heading into the SEC Tournament, they are sitting on six.
But some people disagree. In today’s projections, D1 Baseball has the Tigers in the tournament. I think LSU, based on merit, should be in irregardless of what happens in Hoover this week.
But I don’t like that word “should”.
I never wrote this column because I was busy with work and real life, but when the season started, there was one thing that really stuck with me: how Jay Johnson didn’t like the wording of “defending champion”.
“We’re not defending anything. When you’re being hunted, you’re kind of on defense. We’re not doing that. We’re attacking 2024.”@LSUbaseball Jay Johnson says last year’s national championship is won and there’s no taking it away. It’s now on to a new chapter. #LSU pic.twitter.com/hIAT0BTny1
— Jacques Doucet (@JacquesDoucet) January 29, 2024
As someone who is constantly writing with tone in mind for their day job, Johnson is absolutely right. “Defending” implies that you are not in control and are trying to limit or contain threats. Nobody defends their way to back to back titles, those have to be taken.
In some ways I’m glad I didn’t write that article, because the first half of conference play was very rough on the Tigers and they did not look like a team on the attack. While the competition they were facing was absurdly stacked, they didn’t play with the confidence we saw in the team last June.
As that rough stretch to start conference play wore on and LSU’s record was in a free fall, more and more allusions and references were being made to the seemingly emergent SEC West curse where like Mississippi State and Ole Miss before them, LSU would win a national championship one year only to miss out on the dance – potentially including Hoover. At a certain point, it really felt like wishcasting from fans that became such a focal point that ESPN understandably couldn’t not dedicate time on broadcasts discussing the increasingly real possibility of it.
But as the schedule lightened up, LSU began picking up more wins, going 10-5 down the stretch to look more like the we thought we were going to see. In the final two weeks, we saw the resolve of the Tigers, when they lost the series to Alabama on the back of a rare Alex Milazzo error that allowed Alabama to complete a comeback in the 9th inning. At the time, it felt like that could have been what cost LSU its season, but they only came back to sweep Ole Miss in resounding fashion with a surging Tommy White (which earned him SEC Player of the Week honors) and Michael Braswell along with a pitching staff that seems to be finding its footing.
This week is a good chance for LSU to send a reminder to the rest of the conference on what a reigning champion looks like and to get back out on the attack. This is the SEC Tournament in name only, in reality it is the LSU Invitational. LSU may not win it all (it’s incredible hard to do so coming from a Tuesday game) but with the way they’re playing, come Sunday they could be the one name that no regional host wants to see pop up in their bracket as a two or three seed.
For those teams, as well everyone who tried to write LSU off in April, I have one piece of advice:
Don’t let the Tigers get hot.