The story of Ole Miss baseball’sfirst College World Series titleisn’t one of victory –for the most part, at least. Though the Rebels swept the Coral Gables Regional and the Hattiesburg Super Regional and toppledOklahoma for the CWS title, Ole Miss’ season was far from a wire-to-wire victory.
A preseason top-five ranking gave no indication that the Rebels would nearly miss the NCAA Tournament, sneaking in with the last at-large bid. Rebels fans had no reason to believe in January that they’d watch their team fall out of the SEC Tournament after one game, a 3-1 loss to Vanderbilt. And that ranking showed no signs of the Rebels getting swept not once, but twice:first by Tennessee and later by Alabama.
But after falling nearly out of contention and narrowly making the SEC Tournament, Ole Miss rallied, going from the last team in the NCAA Tournament to the last team standing as red and blue confetti danced across Charles Schwab Field.
Starting hot
After going 45-22 and putting up a fight in the Tucson Super Regional in 2021, Ole Miss entered 2022 with high expectations. The national polls backed up those expectations. Ole Miss ranked No. 5 in D1 Baseball, No. 9 in Baseball America, No. 10 in Perfect Game and No. 19 in Collegiate Baseball.
The Rebels returned with one of the nation’s premier offenses. Still, who would take over on the mound remained unclear following the departures of second-round pick Doug Nikhazy, first-round pick Gunnar Hoglund and sixth-round pick Taylor Broadway.
Those pitching concerns surfaced once the Rebels entered SEC play, but not before Ole Miss jumped out to a 13-1 start in non-conference play. By the time Ole Miss won its first SEC series of the season, the Rebelsranked No. 1 spot in D1 Baseball’s poll.
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A slippery slope
That early-season success wasn’t indicative of what would happen next. Of the teams that Ole Miss beat up on in the beginning of the season, only VCUand UCF finished in the top 100 in RPI.
Against the stacked SEC, home to four of the eight teams that would make it tothe College World Series, Ole Miss’ pitching struggles came to light.
Two weeks after the Rebels took over the national No. 1 spot, Tennessee swept Ole Miss at home, marking the first time an opponent had swept Ole Miss since Mississippi State did it in 2019.
"This isn't the program that has moral victories or got close," Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco said after the third loss of the series, a comeback that came up short. "Losses hurt. It doesn't matter if it's 10-3 or 4-3. But we played a little bit better today. I thought our guys competed."
From then on, moral victories –or any victories, really –were hard to come by for the Rebels. Ole Miss’ preseason pitching concerns were on full display.
Through March 29, two days after losing to Tennessee for the third time, the only consistent starter on the Rebels’ mound was Derek Diamond, who had started a game in every weekend series of the season.
But the most he ever pitched this season was 5⅓ innings.
John Gaddis, Drew McDaniel and Jack Dougherty filled out the rotation in the early part of the season, and they all had the same longevity problem. McDaniel and Dougherty never pitched more than five innings in that stretch, and Gaddis’ longest outing was seven innings.
Two weeks later, Alabama swept Ole Miss, marking the first time the Rebels had been swept twice in a single season since 1997.
"We’re not trying to say, ‘This is the starter,'” Bianco said after Ole Miss’ third loss to Alabama. “We’ve tried to explain it several times. There’s not really a rotation. It’s uncharted waters. We’re just trying to win a baseball game."
To navigate those uncharted waters, Bianco turned to a few unusual prospects in his bullpen to take over starting jobs.
Dylan DeLucia, a transfer from junior college, and Hunter Elliott, a freshman, began to take on more consistent roles. They moved into the rotation alongside Diamond, who had been ranked No. 37 in Perfect Game’s Class of 2019 player ratings.
Before DeLucia and Elliott hit their strides, Ole Miss lost two more weekend series: one to South Carolina and one to Mississippi State. Both teams were SEC bottom-feeders.
“After the State series, we knew we were in a hole,” senior pitcher Brandon Johnson said. "We knew as a team if you look at the record, you could look at our body language, we weren't performing the way we wanted to.”
Turning it around
Losing a series to Mississippi State told the Rebels they needed to make some serious changes. Captain Tim Elko sat each player down in the locker room one at a time to air out grievances.
“We sat there and got it all out, and ever since then we've played some really good ball,” Johnson said.
Good was an understatement. A more accurate picture of the Rebels’ turnaround following the Mississippi State series would be to call it season-savingrather than just good.
Ole Miss embarked on a seven-game win streak with a series sweep of Missouri, a win over then-No. 11 Southern Miss and a series sweep of then-No. 9 LSU.
Bookending that streak were wins over Arkansas and Texas A&M, both ranked No. 4 at the time they each played Ole Miss.
On May 1, Ole Miss was still in danger of missing the SEC Tournament. Bianco said the close losses marring Ole Miss’ schedule were par for the course in the SEC.
By May 15, after sweeping LSU, the Rebels were back in the running. Ole Miss earned theNo. 9 seed in the SEC Tournament in Hoover, Alabama.
The Rebels’ appearance in that tournament, however, was shorter than expected. After more than five hours of weather delays, Ole Miss took the field, only to suffer a 3-1 loss to Vanderbilt.
Ole Miss was back on the bubble for the NCAA Tournament.
"We're just waiting," Elko said after the loss. "Obviously we wanted to win this game. Now it's in the hands of the committee. We feel like we played well enough this year to get in. But we'll see."
The players knew they sat on the edge of selection. But they couldn’t have known just how close they were to missing the tournament all together.
Ole Miss snuck into the NCAA Tournament with the 33rd at-large bid out of 33 available. The Rebels’ celebration was unmatched, Bianco said.
“I've been here 21 times we've done that,” Bianco said. “And what, 18 in our favor? I've never seen it that ecstatic.”
“We’re not done by a longshot, baby,” Gaddis said during the celebration.
They certainly were not. Over the three weeks following Selection Sunday, the Rebels swept the Coral Gables Regional and the Hattiesburg Super Regional, ran through the first round of the College World Series and swept Oklahoma in the College World Series championship.
Ole Miss was about as far as it could have been from the team it was on May 1.
“Life is tough, and there's bad things that happen to everybody,” Bianco said. “Good people, bad things happen. These guys have worked really hard, and I think they've showed a lot of people that you can fall down, you can stumble and you can fail, but that doesn't mean you're a failure.”
Emma Healy is a sports reporting intern for The Tennessean. Contact her at ehealy@gannett.com or followher on Twitter @_EmmaHealy_.
